The Vanished

It's never a good sign if you're watching a thriller, and your first thought is, "Is this supposed to be funny?" So goes the comically overblown The Vanished, the story of two parents trying to find their abducted child and accidentally killing a bunch of people in the process.

Wendy (Heche) and Paul (Jane) are on an RV trip to the middle of nowhere when their daughter Taylor (played by twins KK and Sadie Haim) mysteriously and completely disappears. They were both distracted (Paul most notably by their new bikini-clad neighbor, played by Archer, and so both point fingers to blame the other. Then they turn their ire outwards, as Wendy looks at everyone as a potential kidnapper. One panicked response leads to another, and a hair trigger leaves a suspect's body in the woods. Of course, to kill one random stranger may be regarded as a misfortune; to dispatch three, in increasingly absurd fashion, looks like carelessness.

The most relatable character is Jason Patric's down-home sheriff, played with a degree of resentment that feels a little too organic, but it's a rocky slide after that. Neither Jane nor Heche seems to really be concerned about their daughter's disappearance, overblowing every line and every emotional beat into implausibility, or just ... wandering off. There's a whole school of red herrings, which are really unconnected crimes. Is the abductor the newly-weds in the neighboring RV? The meth-head groundskeeper (Haydon, who at least has a character to play, and does so with more earnestness than anyone else here)? The creepy bait-store owner with the mystery room?

Watching this, you'll probably have a lot of questions, like how old the couple was when they had Taylor, or why no one has emotionally coherent responses - or even seems to be in the same film. Well, none of this is an error of filmmaking, or the storytelling process. It is all explained by an ending so absurd, so unearned, so completely ridiculous that, when it's telegraphed about 10 minutes early, you'll laugh. The same goes if you work it out any earlier. It's a twist loaded with the same venomous derision for the intelligence of the audience that made The Visit so unpleasant. At least there M. Night Shyamalan leaned in to the gross-out nastiness, playing everything as a sick joke. Here, it's an ending meant in seriousness. The Vanished, quite honestly, should live up to its name.