The Vanishing (1993 film)

Plot

Jeff Harriman (Kiefer Sutherland) goes on vacation with his girlfriend Diane Shaver (Sandra Bullock), who vanishes without a trace at a gas station. Three years later, Jeff is still obsessed with finding out what happened. One day, Barney Cousins (Jeff Bridges) arrives at Jeff's door and admits that he was responsible for her disappearance. Cousins promises to show Jeff what happened to Diane, but only if he agrees to go through exactly the same thing she did.

In a short series of flash-backs, the build-up to the crime is shown. Jeff is taken to the gas station where his lover went missing, and is told that if he drinks a cup of coffee which has been drugged, he will discover her fate by experiencing it. He does, and wakes up to find he has been buried alive.

Jeff's new girlfriend, Rita (Nancy Travis), has traced him and his abductor to the area, and discovers just in time what has happened. She gets Cousins to drink drugged coffee by talking about his daughter, but does not realize the drug takes 15 minutes to take effect. She goes in search of Jeff, but is thwarted at the last minute by Cousins. Fortunately, Jeff has revived and is able to climb out of the grave and kill his tormentor with the shovel he had used to bury Jeff and Diane. The remake ends with Jeff and Rita back together, selling the story as a novel to a publishing company.

Cast

Production

Principal photography began on April 6, 1992. Filming took place in and around Washington State, including Seattle, Washington where most of the film takes place. Locations in town includes the Seattle Yacht Club, the Pioneer Square Station, the Sur La Table at the Pike Place Market & the Aloha Street Apartments. The cabin by the lake at the beginning and for the final climax sequences at the end were filmed at Camp Omache near Monroe, Washington. The setting for the gas station where Diane goes missing and Jeff waits by the car, & where Jeff and Barney talk about Diane's fate was filmed at the Mountainside Shell Station at North Bend, Washington. The scene where Barney takes his family to the falls was filmed at Snoqualmie Falls at Snoqualmie, Washington. The second unit then went to Mount St. Helens to film the areas where Jeff and Diane go on their road trip. When filming was completed in Washington, the crew travel to Cody, Wyoming to film the sequence of Jeff's car breaks down in the tunnel. They filmed it at the Cody Tunnel. Finally they went to Los Angeles, California to do the scene where Rita is at the pool hall & where Jeff first meets Rita at the restaurant. Filming wrapped on June 21, 1992.

Released

The Vanishing was released in theatres on February 5, 1993 in 1,656 theatres. For its opening weekend, it landed at #4 at the box office grossing $5.0 million. It gross $6.2 million in its first week. For the second weekend, it dropped to #7 grossing $3.5 million. Finally in its third weekend, it dropped out of the top ten charts to #14 grossing $1.4 million. After three weeks in theatres, the film eventually made $12.3 million, giving a total of $14.5 million. It was considered to be a box office bomb & it failed to bring back its $23 million budget.

Reception

This remake was poorly received and almost universally seen as inferior to the original, with particular criticism for its new happy ending. Variety called it "schematic and unconvincing" while Time Out's Nigel Floyd called it "a misjudged, lobotomized Hollywood remake." Mark Kermode would later summarize that "the original was about the banality of evil, but the remake became about the evil of banality. It was a mess." Salon.com named the film as the worst remake of all time. The movie currently holds a 47% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 34 reviews.