Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Vanished’ on Netflix, Where Thomas Jane And Anne Heche Are A Couple With An RV And A Secret

In The Vanished, streaming hard with a vengeance on Netflix, a couple and their young daughter drive their RV onto a campground and into a mess of missing kids, unlikely murders, and a whole tank of diesel-fueled suspicion. Who did it? Did it even happen? Wait, what?

THE VANISHED: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Paul (Thomas Jane) and Wendy (Ann Heche) are cruising in their gigantic recreational vehicle, belting out road songs as their young daughter Taylor sings along in back. “You’re smack dab in the middle of Shitsville, USA,” the owner of the RV Park spits at them when they arrive, and that’s a little off putting, but hey, let’s vacay! But Paul barely has time to don his fishing hat and get an eyeful of neighboring RV owner Miranda (Aleksei Archer) in her inflatable hot tub before Taylor is suddenly and inexplicably gone. And The Vanished launches into a lengthy midsection featuring law enforcement canvassing the area, suggestive creepiness from the RV owner and his lurchy, no-account groundskeeper, and Paul and Wendy seeming to vacillate between emotional distress and an odd, unsettled detachment from their daughter’s apparent disappearance.

The Vanished was written and directed by actor Peter Facinelli of Twilight fame, and his wavering, probing camera work infuses a sense of foreboding into nearly everything happening. A bearded Jason Patric shows up as Sheriff Booker, who seems checked out from the get-go, as he’s dealing with the loss of his own son, a penchant for the bottle, and a failing marriage. But when Booker tells Wendy and Paul that an escaped convict is lurking in the woods, and they perhaps too-quickly kill a guy they discover out there while searching for their daughter, the foreboding starts to feel like it’s foreshadowing a very different outcome than the standard-issue resolution of Taylor’s disappearance.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The generic final title of The Vanished aligns it with The Vanishing, which also includes murder (and Peter Mullan and Gerard Butler), but in a 1900’s setting on a lighthouse off the coast of Scotland. The taut 1997 thriller Breakdown features Kurt Russell in a war of wits and wills with the fantastic, departed character actor JT Walsh in a frantic attempt to find his missing and/or kidnapped wife, played by Kathleen Quinlan.

Performance Worth Watching: Thomas Jane is solid here as Paul, a Gulf War vet who always wanted the best for his wife and daughter, but has been driven into quirks of weird and bouts of manic behavior by the circumstances of his union. His broad, aging mug contorts at all the right moments, and Jane’s penchant for delivering bursts of lines at an ascending speed helps suggest the busted emotions that dwell under Paul’s fishing hat.

Memorable Dialogue: “What if they were trying to have a baby so badly that they took ours instead?” As Wendy, slowly but surely falling apart at the seams, starts to cast about for answers, Anne Heche’s strained frown and narrowed eyes help us believe that her character might actually be capable of accusing a total stranger of abduction while simultaneously admitting she searched their motor home.

Sex and Skin: Paul’s opportunities to ogle fellow RV park guest Miranda grow more Clark Griswoldian over time, to the point that, when he and Wendy search her RV, he pauses to paw through digital images of Miranda in the buff.

Our Take: The Vanished was originally called Hour of Lead, a phrase found in the Emily Dickinson poem that appears on screen at the film’s outset. The poem sorts through notions of grief and loss, and the sense of how those emotions transform us, which as it turns out is just what’s happened to Paul and Wendy. Jane and Heche shuttle easily between emotional faces — that of a couple freaked out about their potentially kidnapped kid, to that of two damaged people who have only their vices left to glue them together. Vanished drifts into an Agatha Christie-like rolodex of potential kidnappers for a bit too long, and Jason Patric staring obsessively across a silent lake doesn’t have the gravity the numerous shots of this happening seem to think it does.

But the film rights itself whenever Jane and Heche are captured doing nutso things like impulsively searching a neighboring RV, or accusing each other of past indiscretions. And in its final, frenetic few moments of reveal, The Vanishing offers a twist worthy of the time it took to get there.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The twist The Vanished offers doesn’t fully absolve the bouts of tedium in its conventional thriller setup. And yet, that twist. It’s gonzo enough to get this thing in your streaming queue.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch The Vanished on Netflix