Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Vanished Into the Night’ on Netflix, a Taut, Silly Thriller About a Desperate Man Trying to Get Back His Kidnapped Kids

One of a parent’s most intense nightmares comes true in Vanished Into the Night (now on Netflix), a tense Italian mystery-thriller about a dad whose kids just, you know, vanish into the night. Directed by Renato De Maria (The Ruthless, Robbing Mussolini), the film remakes Patxi Amezcua’s 2013 Spanish thriller Septimo (aka The 7th Floor), with Riccardo Scamarcio (a couple of John Wicks) and Annabelle Wallis (Malignant, Peaky Blinders) leading the cast. This new film is very much in the Hitchcock wrong-man vein, puppeting its protagonist through a series of convolutions and frustrations that might pay off in the end if everyone involved is diligent and committed – which they pretty much almost are.

VANISHED INTO THE NIGHT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: One minute, they’re swimming in the beautiful waters off the coast of Italy with the kids, the next, they’re parked in a divorce hearing with lawyers. Such is life. Pietro (Scamarcio) and Elena (Wallis) have reached the irreconcilable differences stage, and now it’s all about custody and who gets what. Her lawyer points out Pietro’s gambling debts and his lawyer points out Elena’s drug issues – but Pietro jumps in, plays it sympathetic, and says the problem with the painkillers came about after a prescribed dosage slid into addiction. Are you paying attention to this? Hope so. It might be relevant later.

Pietro seems like a nice enough guy. He made some mistakes and seems close to pulling himself out of trouble. There’s the matter of owing a dude some dough – €250k, which ain’t nothing – but he’s good with the kids and is rehabbing an old farm into a B&B. We see him interact with Nico (Massimiliano Gallo), who oozes a bit of slime, and we get the sense that Pietro’s trying to distance himself from past shady doings, like the doings this guy Nico is almost certainly doing. I mean, his boat is so much bigger than Pietro’s, something his kids don’t hesitate to point out while he winces a little. Anyway, it’s Pietro’s night with the little scamps. He puts Giovanni (Lorenzo Ferrante) and Bianca (Gaia Coletti) to bed, then cracks a beer and fires up a joint while he watches the game. A bit later he checks on the children and they’re not there. He searches all over the property – up and down, hither and yon. Nowhere to be seen. What gives? It seems they’ve been TITLE OF MOVIE’D.

He calls Elena, frantic. She drives out to the farm. Marital tensions are set aside, mostly anyway. Pietro gets a call: He needs to cough up €150k in ransom, or else. He doesn’t have that kind of money. Who does? Elena knows: Nico. Pietro’s like aw man not that guy and Elena’s like what other choice do we have and so he goes to Nico, who’s like OK you can have the money but you have to do a little something for me first. And that little something is, Pietro will take his boat on a quick three-hour tour to Greece to pick up a “package” for Nico. I’m sure it’s just some stacks of old newspapers or collectable Precious Moments figurines, something like that, and totally not drugs, not at all. So poor, desperate Pietro gets a goodbye-and-good-luck kiss from Elena (woo woo), then hops on his boat so he can look all sweaty and suspicious for the rest of the movie, but only because everything goes so smashingly well, with no problems at all, nosirree. But that’s a lie! It goes rather poorly! Wouldn’t be much of a movie if he had a perfectly lovely evening, would it?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Pietro doesn’t exist in a movie with the scale, ambition and relative budget of North by Northwest, but that story of an exasperated man on the run certainly comes to mind.

Performance Worth Watching: Scamarcio’s wide, expressive eyes are employed quite effectively as he plays the upsettingly put-upon protagonist – in a movie that puts more emphasis on plot than character.

Memorable Dialogue: Poor Pietro decides he has to execute Nico’s sketchy plan: “I have no choice. I’m the one who f—ed it up. I’m going to fix it now.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: No detail is too small in the first act of Vanished Into the Night – you never know which one is foreshadowing important future happenings, or might be a very important plot device come the third act. That’s what kind of movie this is: Silly and implausible, but tightly directed by De Maria, whose goal is to hold us in suspense and make us feel all harried and emotional and so caught up in Pietro’s exasperated downward-spiral into possibly insanity that we won’t see it coming when he starts pulling rugs out from under us. 

Yes, this movie is contrived, and far too tidy in its execution of Seemingly Pointless Details That You Probably Weren’t Paying Attention To, in a quest to be oh-so-clever. But if you toss your suspension of disbelief overboard to the sharks for 90 minutes, you’ll be entertained by its small-scale gaslighting-conspiracy plot and Scamarcio’s harried performance, and appreciate how De Maria builds tension so very tantalizingly close to the breaking point, namely, when we stop believing and start laughing. I’m not sure the payoff is wholly satisfying – I kept saying there better be a juicy other-shoe dropping here soon – but after doing the math, I was engrossed by this story more than I wasn’t. 

Our Call: Nobody’s reinventing any wheels with Vanished Into the Night, but for a lickety-split distraction of a popcorn thriller, you could do far worse. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.