Spoorloos

Rex Hofman and Saskia Wagter are a Dutch couple driving through France on vacation. They quarrel; Rex lets the car die in a tunnel and refuses to move, leaving Saskia alone in the dark until she breaks. They make up at the next service station — a busy, sun-drenched motorway stop full of tourists. Saskia goes inside to buy drinks. She doesn't come back.

Rex searches the rest stop, then the surrounding roads, then files reports with French police. He returns to the Netherlands. He puts up posters. He appears on television. He meets a new woman, Lieneke, who loves him and accepts what she has inherited — that he can't stop, that part of him will always be standing at that service station. Years pass. He is still looking.

The film cuts between Rex and Raymond Lemorne: a chemistry teacher in a small French town, husband, father of two daughters, entirely unremarkable. Years before Saskia disappeared, Raymond became consumed by a private obsession — to commit the "ultimate evil," not from hatred or for gain, but as a pure act of will, to learn whether he was capable of it. He ran trial runs for years: approaching women at service stations, rehearsing a story about a sprained wrist to get them near his car, perfecting a sedative in their drink. Saskia was not chosen for any reason. She was available.

Raymond contacts Rex by letter. He has been following Rex's search with clinical detachment, curious what it feels like to be the one who doesn't know. He offers a deal: he will tell Rex exactly what happened to Saskia, but Rex must experience it himself. Rex cannot live, cannot stop. He agrees.

Raymond drugs his coffee at a roadside meeting. Rex wakes in total darkness, in a wooden box, underground. A lighter is in his hand — the same lighter Raymond placed in Saskia's hand. He understands. The film cuts to Lieneke cycling past a field on a country road, no idea what is beneath her. Rex is in the new grave. Saskia is in the old one, below him. The film ends.