The Vanishing

George Sluizer's The Vanishing (Dutch: Spoorloos) won the European Film Award for Best Film at the 1988 EFA ceremony (the first ever European Film Awards prizes, given before they had taken on the Felix and later Lux branding) and is now widely treated as one of the canonical works of late-twentieth-century European thriller cinema. The film won the César for Best Foreign Film in 1989 and has appeared on multiple Sight & Sound and BFI lists of greatest thrillers across decades.

The film is adapted from Tim Krabbé's 1984 novel Het Gouden Ei (literally The Golden Egg); Krabbé adapted his own novel for the screenplay. The Dutch-French co-production was shot in Nijmegen and across various French motorway service areas, with cinematography by Toni Kuhn. The cast pairs Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, Gene Bervoets and Johanna ter Steege in the central trio; ter Steege won the European Film Award for Best Supporting Actress at the same EFA ceremony.

Sluizer himself directed the 1993 American remake of his own film, also titled The Vanishing, with Jeff Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland and Sandra Bullock, a remarkable case of a European art-house director being given a Hollywood property to remake his own work, with substantially altered narrative material at the studio's insistence. Sluizer has been outspoken about his unhappiness with the U.S. version. The original Dutch film is regularly cited as one of Stanley Kubrick's favourite films, Kubrick reportedly described it to interviewers as the most terrifying film he had ever seen, and his praise has appeared in repeated promotional materials for the film's reissues since the 1990s.