Film #18 — 4/4 Films Based on Novels
Also filed under: A-One
By C. Ramsay
An extremely slow burning, quiet character study about loss, grief, and the human condition in the face of tragedy. Rex and Saskia, a couple on holiday, pull up to a busy rest stop where Saskia suddenly disappears. Rex, never having given up the search and taunted by postcards from the supposed abductor, returns to the scene after three years desperately seeking answers. Aside from a few minutes the audience has alone with Rex and Saskia at the beginning of the film, the killer is introduced early on. The focus is almost never on who, but on the depressingly unanswerable question of why.
Jumping between character perspectives, director George Sluizer subjects the viewer to a mixture of firsthand accounts of the actions of certain people as well as the secondhand understanding of them through stories and explanations. From our own viewpoint there is no telling what’s reliable or to what extent, we’re forced to accept what we’re given without question or risk our questions being forever unresolved. The scene of Saskia’s disappearance at the start of the film, shot from Rex’s point of view, provides a sample of the frustration this feeling brings—of realizing something isn’t right and thinking there must be an easy explanation, something simple we’ve overlooked, before the aching sense of dread starts to creep in, giving way to overwhelming panic. Everything can be done right and it still won’t matter.
At certain points in Rex’s search for Saskia, moments we have no way to distinguish as viewers, his intentions evolve from seeking her safety, to wanting justice for her memory, to obsessing over quelling his personal turmoil around her disappearance. His curiosity and need for answers completely overcome his rationality to the point where for him, it’s no longer even about why but simply how. Both he and Raymond, the killer, are operatives of obligation, though this commonality is the only one they seem to share and they feel and exert their obligations in different ways. Where Rex sees this detail and takes it as equivalence—balanced ground from which Raymond is able to be reasoned with or manipulated—Raymond sees it as a way to easily exploit someone driven mad by the unknown.
The story is presented as a nihilistic exposition of grief and reasoning that ponders how it can be possible to adjust to a nonsensical narrative with tangible ramifications. What happens when a killer isn’t interested in the killing itself, but in what can be learned from it anthropologically—when the gratification comes from how much people care about the victim in the aftermath of their disappearance rather than from the process of disappearing and murdering them? Rex’s unwillingness to accept the answers he’s given for Saskia’s disappearance, or to accept that the answers he’s specifically looking for don’t exist at all, serves more as a reflection of his own values and personhood than it does any kind of tributary action for Saskia’s memory. His obligation is to himself, as is Raymond’s.
Star rating (/5): ★★★★½
Recommend?: Yes