 A film in three minutes, the vanishing. You're on holiday with your wife. You're happy, almost content. Nothing can spoil this moment between you both. Except, all of a sudden and without any trace, the person you love is gone. Disappeared, kidnapped, with no clues as to where she could be. Do you grieve over your loss and try to rebuild your life? Or would not knowing her fate slowly turn into an obsession? Lasting for years, demanding constant sacrifice, pushing others away and only ending once you've finally found out the truth. And does knowing that truth mean more to you than your very life? Because in George Slizer's 1988 psychological thriller The Vanishing, one man is about to be asked that very question and make such a decision. Based on the novella The Golden Egg written by Tim Krabay, The Vanishing or Schwoilosch in Dutch, which translates to Without a Trace, follows the life of Rex Hoffman, played by Jens Berwoods, whose wife Saskia goes missing at a surface station in France in the film's opening. After three years of relentless searching, Rex receives several postcards from the kidnapper, asking to meet at a cafe, but then never revealing himself in person. Frustrating a paranoid Rex who later makes a televised public appeal to the kidnapper, asking them to only tell him what happened to Saskia and nothing more, which the kidnapper agrees to. Slizer's direction of the story's dark exploration of human nature is replete with tension from the film's first scene, rarely letting up even in moments of quiet reflection thanks to the obsessive performance of Berwoods, whose character's steely determination to find out what happened to his wife places more and more strain upon his mental health, and costs him another relationship with a new lover. But what really makes the story stand out from other thrillers rests in how seemingly ordinary and mundane the life of the kidnapper is, especially when we see him plotting and then carrying out his terrifying act. The banality of evil is well and truly present here, as the life and psychology of the kidnapper is gradually revealed to us, depicting not a monster akin to Hannibal Lecter, but instead something far more horrifying, an unassuming, regular person. Stanley Kubrick, no stranger to the darker side of human nature, commented to Slizer that the vanishing was the scariest film he had ever seen, watching it no less than 10 times. Once you see it for yourself, it's easy to understand why, not just for its depiction of evil, presented in the form of such an insipid, modest persona, but also for how our terrifying desperation to know the truth can become so all-consuming, leaving us, the viewer, to ask ourselves if we would go to the lengths Rex would in order to achieve such truth, as the answer might not always set you free.