The Disappeared is a can’t-stop-watching psychological supernatural thriller set in the high-rise squalor of London’s public housing. Matthew (Harry Treadaway) is an emotionally distraught teenager back in the slums after a stint in psychiatric care. His trouble stems from the disappearance of his younger brother Tom; the eight-year old disappeared from a playground as Matthew partied carelessly with his friends. His father (Greg Wise), a heavy drinking and sullen man given to flashes of explosive rage, blames Matthew, who in turn comes to suspect his father as the killer. Needless to add, father-son dialogue is fraught with hostile silence.
The emotional and spatial claustrophobia of their relationship, the uncertainty faced by every teenager at the crossroads of great decisions and the hard-edged, impoverished setting are well handled by writer-director Johnny Kevorkian—as is the psychologically uncertain introduction of the supernatural into the already tense, hot-house environment. Along with unsettling memories and nightmares of being buried alive, Matthew thinks he hears his brother calling and begins to glimpse the boy’s reflection in the window. Things get spookier when he realizes that the local psychic he consults, who proclaims the district as a “cursed area,” died in a fire years ago.
Out May 18 on DVD, The Disappeared is an intriguingly structured story suggesting that the darkness lurks behind the most banal, or even benign, facades.
