A girl’s disappearance impacts a remote campsite where no one is what they seem.
Paul and Wendy are traveling in their RV, taking their young daughter on her first family trip. They find a small, remote campground, where they meet the staff and some of the other campers. The campsite is run by Tom (John D. Hickman) and a socially awkward groundskeeper (Alex Haydon) appears at random as he’s handling the area.
Once they arrive, Wendy (Anne Heche) goes to pay the deposit on their lot. Paul (Thomas Jane) meets one of the campers from a nearby plot. Miranda (Aleksei Archer) is on a coast-to-coast trip with her husband, Eric (Kirstopher Wente.) Paul’s brief conversation with her is long enough that he loses track of Taylor (KK & Sadie Heim), their daughter.
This is where writer/director Peter Facinelli begins to branch out into a variety of subplots. A manhunt soon follows, led by Sheriff Baker (Jason Patric). He reveals that the local police are already searching the woods for an escaped prisoner. This is reason enough for the couple to sneak out and search on their own. They find a man in the woods, and accidentally kill him in a scuffle.
This is just the first layer of craziness introduced in the story. The sheriff has a horrible past life event. The groundskeeper is hiding his own secret. Facts about the escaped prisoner emerge. Even Eric and Miranda appear to be hiding something. In all, there are no characters who are just characters. Every one of them introduces a potential resolution to the story.
The Vanished is an intriguing story and Jane, Heche and Patric portray their respective heartache and anger well. Facinelli intersperses some beautiful landscapes of the camp and surrounding area. Sacha Chaban’s score goes from minimal to thunderous as needed. Viewers who stick around will be treated to a final act that ties together all of the various threads and reveals all of the carefully planted plot devices.
Reviews of The Vanished fall primarily into two camps. Many who have hated the movie admittedly bailed within the first half hour. The first act storytelling is slow by design. Finishing the film provides plenty of pay-off visuals. The movie runs a little under two hours and feels open but never too slow to tell the story. The acting is excellent, even if the story feels a little empty and packed with a crazy number of subplots at the same time.
The Vanished falls in that category of good but not amazing. Once viewers watch the reveal at the end, there’s a decent chance that it’s worth a rewatch, just to see how many hints that they might have missed the first time.