The Vanishing (1988 film)

The Vanishing (Dutch: Spoorloos, literally: "Without a Trace" or "Traceless"; French: L'homme qui voulait savoir, literally: "The Man Who Wanted to Know") is a 1988 psychological thriller film co-written and directed by George Sluizer, and starring Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, Gene Bervoets, and Johanna ter Steege in her feature film debut. The film recounts a man's obsessive years-long search for his girlfriend after she mysteriously disappears from a rest area in the French countryside. The screenplay was adapted by Sluizer and Tim Krabbé from Krabbé's novella The Golden Egg (1984).

A co-production between the Netherlands and France, The Vanishing was filmed mostly on location in Nîmes.

The film was theatrically released in the Netherlands on 27 October 1988, with a French release following on 20 December 1989. It received positive reviews from film critics, with praise for its tension, performances, and psychological horror elements. The film was particularly well-received in the United States, where it was named the Top Foreign Film of the Year by the National Board of Review, as well as receiving nominations from the National Society of Film Critics and New York Film Critics Circle. The film was selected as the Dutch submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1988, but was disqualified after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences determined it featured too much French dialogue for it to adequately represent the Netherlands.

Sluizer remade the film in English in 1993.