Name: Big Picture: The Vanishing (1988)
Start: 2025-08-27T19:30:00-04:00
Location: Tampa Theatre

Part of August's BIG PICTURE: HELTER SWELTER
****************************************
1h 47m / R / Crime, Thriller
TRAILER:

VENUE: Historic Duncan Auditorium
****************************************
We’ve shown some shocking, challenging films here at Tampa Theatre over the years, some that are much more difficult to watch than The Vanishing. And we’re excited to present this film, which is a powerful and fascinatingly crafted work of art, but all the same, we almost feel guilty. Some people are going to watch this movie and regret it. Be sure that you’re ready.
The Vanishing is composed of two stories, their intersection, and their separate consequences. One: a young Dutch couple, Rex and Saskia, deeply in love, decide to take a sweaty summer vacation in France. They stop at a rest area where they buy some snacks and fill up the gas tank. But Saskia disappears. The other: Raymond, a professor and devoted family man, decides to kidnap and murder a stranger. Anything else we tell you about the plot would blunt the impact of the film itself.
It’s said, usually regretfully, that people are afraid of what they don’t understand. But it’s more about what they’re familiar with; people are afraid of what they don’t see a lot. Singularity is scarier than regularity. Not to be morbid, but most people die because of ten thousand little decisions multiplied out over the course of their lives: what to have for dinner, how fast to drive, whether to floss, invisible externalities they can’t even perceive, much less prevent. But we’re scared of spiders, and lightning, and murderers skulking in the dark. The Vanishing says: you probably saw the thing that’s going to get you. It’s probably mundane. Just something that happens. It probably stood right in front of you, in the broad daylight.