Better thought of as The Reappearing. George Sluizer's remake — and travesty — of his own 1988 thriller is nothing so much as a monument to American provincialism and ethnocentrism: if it isn't in English, it can't be a real movie. Never mind that it was a perfectly good movie, and a perfectly commercial movie, when in Dutch and French. American audiences can't be expected to read when they go to the movies. Reading is too much like schoolwork. Movies are for recess. Then, too: a no smaller concession to American taste, and a far more artistically compromising one, is the retooling of the plot (not to create an altogether new movie, just to get around that horrific ending), the consequent building-up of a secondary character, and, above all, the casting of that character. The immediate winningness of Nancy Travis, to say nothing of her closer-to-star status in relation to Sandra Bullock, tilts the emotional axis of the film away from the past — and the mysteriously vanished girlfriend — and toward the three-years-later present — and the new, the palpable, the immeasurably preferable girlfriend. (Imagine the same film with the casting reversed!) Further, the new girlfriend's function in the plot completely alters — conventionalizes — weakens — the suspense dynamics and the impact of the final revelation. Parallel editing — that time-honored, D.W. Griffith-perfected, suspense-building device — has seldom been so counterproductive. Jeff Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd
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