10 Movies Where Evil Won
2. The Vanishing
If you haven't seen George Sluizer's incredible 1988 Dutch thriller about a man desperately searching for his missing girlfriend, you absolutely need to change that. Like, right now.
After Saskia (Johanna ter Steege) disappears at a service station, her boyfriend Rex (Gene Bervoets) spends the rest of the movie unable to move on, even as the years pass by.
As is uncommon for the genre, Sluizer's film doesn't try to shield the audience from its antagonist, instead depicting kidnapper Raymond (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu) in all of his unsettling ordinariness.
And that is the true genius of this film - evil is everyday and banal, and could manifest within your neighbour, your co-worker or that guy in front of you in the supermarket.
Rex's determined fascination with finding out what happened to Saskia ultimately leads him to meet up with Raymond, who promises to reveal what happened to Saskia if Rex agrees to go through the same process.
Rex, wracked by his curiosity, agrees to drink a drugged coffee given to him by Raymond, after which he wakes up buried alive, doomed to his fate.
The movie then ends with Raymond enjoying a relaxing day at home with his family, cementing the deeply disturbing duality of his "normal" life and the impossible evil lurking within.
Frustratingly, when Sluizer remade the movie for Hollywood a few years later - starring Kiefer Sutherland, Sandra Bullock and Jeff Bridges - he served up a happier, endlessly inferior ending (where the boyfriend character kills the kidnapper). Gross.