Fact and fiction. A woman goes missing in broad daylight at a busy service station. An inexplicable disappearance that is teased for the rest of the film, with Sluizer only alluding to the horrors that seem certain to have occurred. The moment she vanishes is shown from the perspective of her boyfriend, who doesn’t actually see anything, only realising her absence and frantically looking for her. Then, a different man, briefly seen where she disappeared, is shown separately conducting a series of experiments. He encourages his family to scream as loudly as they can in their secluded countryside home and later asks his neighbours if they heard anything. He times with a stopwatch how long different doses of chloroform keep him unconscious. He rehearses conversations designed to encourage women to get into his car, and checks his heart rate after testing them with real people. And then he’s shown at the gas station again. The past catches up with the present. These images are the only objective information Sluizer offers. A woman has disappeared without a trace, and this man has been behaving strangely.
Years pass, and any hopes of finding her are now remote. Her boyfriend keeps up the search, putting up posters and making public pleas for information on TV. At the same time, the mysterious man still torments him from afar, hiding in plain sight and preying on his desperation. His obsessive need to find out what happened makes him susceptible to anything, and he’s made himself an easy target. And so the two men finally meet, and everything is revealed. But the perspective is no longer objective. It’s a version of events. A version authored and narrated by a man who has thought of every possible angle already, who has considered every variable in great detail. He’s telling a story to a man who wants to believe him, and he could be telling him anything. This might be what actually happened, but then again it might not be, and that’s the horror of The Vanishing. There are no answers that can help this man. No closure, no satisfaction. Just more questions, and dead ends, and lost time. Nothing can alleviate the horrors of the unknown.