“The Flash is a kid’s movie by comparison”: For Stanley Kubrick, this movie is the scariest he’s ever seen.

“The Flash is a kid’s movie by comparison”: For Stanley Kubrick, this movie is the scariest he’s ever seen.

Today’s sadly largely forgotten director George Sluizer, who died in 2014 at the age of 82, created a powerful film: The Man Who Wanted to Know, dealing with existential dread, abductions and the trauma of losing a loved one.

What do you do when a loved one is missing and presumed dead? That’s the premise adopted by this excellent film, helmed at arm’s length by the excellent and disturbing Bernard-Pierre Donadier. A few years later, the director would also make a remake in the United States called The Vanishing, this time starring Kiefer Sutherland and Jeff Bridges.

story The man who wanted to know ? On their way to vacation, Rex and Saskia stop at a highway rest area. The man walks away from the car for a few minutes. When he returned, his partner was gone. Maddened by grief, he gives up his professional and social life to devote himself solely to the search for the missing woman. After three years of unsuccessful searching, he receives a strange postcard, the author of which claims to know the truth about the disappearance…

This film had a profound effect on a filmmaker who needs almost no introduction: Stanley Kubrick. In terms of cinematic taste, the master has additionally boiled. His favorite works have been widely documented: The Godfather, Treasures of the Sierra Madre, City Lights, his favorite Chaplin, Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, which he also named as his second favorite movie of all time…he also loved it. The weirdness of David Lynch’s Eraserhead.

“The Flash is a children’s movie in comparison”

In fact, such was the impact of Sluizer’s film – and its disturbing ending – on Kubrick that he called him and told him that it was the scariest film he had ever seen. The anecdote is told by Sluizer himself, In a video interview he gave to publisher Criterion in May 2014.

“I couldn’t find a distributor for more than a year after submitting my film at Cannes, no one cared. Stanley Kubrick wanted Johanna ter Steeg (main actor of the movie) for his next film” Comments Sluizer.

“To my great satisfaction, Kubrick turned out to be the biggest fan of my film. He’s seen it, I think, ten times. He called me when I was working in Los Angeles, reviewed every frame of the film. I remember him saying to me. I said, ‘This is the scariest film I’ve ever seen.’ In my life!” It’s not as scary as your movie.”

I want to discover The man who wanted to know ? Fortunately it has just been released on DVD/Blu-ray combo, under the auspices of Sidonis Calysta. It was also released in theaters.

Source: Allocine

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