Pulpy Nonsense Should Be More Entertaining Than Netflix's 'Vanished Into the Night'

You know that feeling when you’re a well-off, handsome Italian guy who enjoys swan diving off his boat into the sea with his beautiful American wife and two healthy young children and everything in your life seems idyllic, but actually—uh-oh!—you’re also haunted by your crippling gambling debts? And you know what it’s like when you’re just in the middle of a nasty divorce with that aforementioned wife when your children suddenly disappear from your house one night, leading you to—of course—go on a desperate quest to find them that may or may not include tangling with the seedy underbelly of sun-kissed Bari? Don’t you just hate it when that happens?!

Vanished Into the Night (Svaniti nella notte), the new Netflix drama-thriller directed by Renato De Maria and starring Riccardo Scamarcio and Annabelle Wallis, has, on paper, a lot of the elements that usually lead the way towards me having a good time with a film. It has a mystery. A Mediterranean setting. Boats and ships. A contrast between an idyllic locale and the sordid elements hidden underneath the surface. That’s all good stuff! And, let’s face it, no one’s ever complaining about getting to watch Ricardo Scamarcio do a bit of green-eyed brooding, are they?

It starts promisingly enough too, with a punchy script featuring fairly grounded characters with believable motivations. It doesn’t waste time and moves along at an efficient, pulpy pace, the actors committed and empathetic enough to hook us in. It’s not bad looking, especially for a Netflix film. There’s some nice framing here and there, and a a bit of an actual color palette. Unfortunately, it’s not long before proceedings veer messily off course. The writing starts to swerve into unintentionally funny territory. The motivations and characterizations fray. That fast pace that initially felt refreshing reveals a fatal flaw: In speeding through its twists and turns, the superficiality of its characters is revealed, and a lack of any coherent message becomes abundantly clear. Is it about the lengths we’ll go to protect the ones we love? Is it about trust? Friendship? I don’t know. I don’t think the film knows either.

In many of the entries of Nintendo’s Zelda video game franchise, you can cook food by collecting items and combining them in a heated pot. The quality of the food and the effects it has on the player will depend on the combinations that you throw into the pot. The best dishes recover a significant portion of your health and grant some temporary bonus to your status—extra speed, defense, or attack power, for example. Part of the art of mastering Zelda games is learning which ingredients will combine to cook up a useful, hearty dish. It’s also knowing how to avoid cooking up the dud known as ‘Dubious Food’—a recurring item in the games that results from combining the wrong items. ‘Dubious Food’ doesn’t poison you, but it does have minimal impact on your health and status. Sometimes it’s obvious which ingredients shouldn’t be mixed together, but at other times you might be convinced you’re on to a winner, only to be met with that unappetizing mess. Vanished Into the Night has big ‘Dubious Food’ vibes. You won’t get food poisoning, but you’ll also get basically nothing out of it.