HoopTober 8: Mosquito Takes Mandragon

Movie 38
Six decades: 1st of 2 films from the 80's

My first reaction to The Vanishing was one of extreme frustration. Why did he make that decision? It was so obviously a BAD IDEA. Of course, the movie knows we know it’s a bad idea, and the emphasis on how a man could be led to make such a bad choice. Because he knew it was a bad idea too. Not just probably a bad idea, but definitely a bad idea. (I’m going to stop saying “bad idea” now).

It was only on later reflection that I realized what George Sluizer had just achieved. Having now watched so many fucking movies in my life, especially over the last few years, it’s becoming rarer and rarer for me to be able to subsume my own awareness of the craft. I don’t see that as a bad thing – I love noticing and appreciating aspects of the film-making craft. But it’s now unusual for me to be so absorbed in the story being told that I literally forget that I am watching a movie.

The Vanishing led me rather casually into its story and then transfixed me for the full duration. Even when it confounds expectation – this plot takes sudden right and left turns which you would just never normally see taken in a film – the dissonance I felt was more about what it meant for the characters than about what Sluizer might have been trying. I watched the film in a stupor of non-analysis. Which means I can’t tell you why it’s good, just that it is good.

Is it a horror film? The more appropriate question might be whether this fits into any existing notion of genre at all. It’s experimental, but not in the way you imagine an experimental film to be. It’s an experiment in tale-telling. The predicament of our main protagonist is certainly a horrifying prospect. The psychosis of our antagonist (who might actually be just another protagonist) is presented in such an unorthodox way, sometimes we forget how evil he is. And it’s whenever the fact of what he is doing strikes you that it suddenly sends a chill down your back.

And then Sluizer decides to stop toying with us and we get that ending. Fuck. FUCK!!!

An amazing, unique film – I’d recommend it to anyone who can handle dark subject matter and likes to have their comfortable concepts of what it is to be a human being dissected and examined - and who doesn’t, from time to time? I ask you.