Spoorloos (or) The Vanishing
The Vanishing is the American remake of a 1988 Dutch-French film called Spoorloos, and if you have the chance, do not see the remake. I don’t mean to insult it, but they Americanize the ending and in the process, ruin the entire point of the fucking movie. I feel the need to tell you now, the rest of this entry will contain major spoilers for this film. The kicker is though, the movie is over 20 years old, so I am not going to feel that bad about spoiling it.
Spoorloos follows man and a woman who are arguing (as couples are oft to do). The woman needs something and goes into a store, but she never comes out. Her boyfriend gets obsessed, but no one ever finds anything or gets any answers, and so he takes it upon himself to get the answers about his wife’s whereabouts and well-being. Though the entirety of the movie will not affect people with claustrophobia, the ending will fuck them up and never leave them.
Here is where the SPOILERS start pouring in.
Our protagonist ends up finding a man who says he knows what happened his wife. But there is fine print. If he wants to know what happened to his wife, he will have to endure what she endured. If he can do that, he can get his answers. He agrees, gets drugged, and wakes up in a coffin, buried alive. This is where the original ends.
Of course, in The Vanishing, his new girlfriend finds him and digs him out, just in time. But in the original, when he realizes that is his fate and that was his wife’s fate as well, it not only screws with you if you hate small spaces, but it screws with you in general.
It’s just so terrifying and dark because shit like that really happens to people.
