The Vanishing

I read that this was supposedly one of the scariest movies of all time. It's not scary, so much as just creepy and chilling. What's remarkable about it is that it goes well beyond most movies in the thriller or horror genre in exploring themes of existential dread and fate. The antagonist bucks fate once by jumping off a building as a youth. He reasons that it's predestined that he - won't - jump off the building, so off he goes. Likewise, [spoiler] it's predestined that people like him, a family man with two daughters, which is significant - won't - kidnap people and send them to their dusty doom, so, in his warped reasoning, kidnap them, he must[/spoiler]. As a portrait of the inner workings of a madman and sociopath, it's a fascinating movie, and from a directing standpoint, it apparently inspired countless movies that came after it.

This Dutch film tells the story of a woman who disappears from a cafe and her lover who searches for her for the next three years. This is a slow film without any action to speak of. I never got impatient with it because I was interested to see whether the man finds out what happened to the woman. He does. In what has to be one of the most shocking endings I've ever seen, "The Vanishing" reveals what it's known for: a dark, merciless conclusion.