The Vanished ~ My Murdered Wife’s Body is Missing?

“The Vanished” is a Korean movie released in 2018, and categorized as Crime, Mystery, Thriller and Suspense, and is streaming on many platforms. This Korean drama is adapted from “The Body”, a 2012 Spanish Thriller/Mystery.

♦ Why is There No Body on the Slab in the Cooler?

In “The Vanished”, detectives are called to a morgue because a security guard is babbling something about seeing a ghost, and the words coming out of his mouth are jumbled up, confused, and make no sense.  Yet he insists he’s telling the truth about what happened.

In morgues around the world, a dead body is often kept in a cooler (a refrigerated room), both before and after autopsies. The dead bodies are placed on a morgue slab, where they stay until the undertaker comes to pick them up OR they get transported somewhere else.

The sliding slabs are kind of like drawers that you can open and close. You pull out the slab, view the body or remove the body, and/or slide the body back in and close to the door … until people figure out what they are going to do with the dead body.

Why all this explanation and detail? Uuumm … it isn’t often that a dead body opens the door to a slab, pushes the slab out, gets off the slab, and walks away! So if someone saw an empty slab and thought they saw a body sitting upright on a floor outside of the cooler, but there is no dead body … others might say that’s “suspicious”.

There are a few plausible explanations for such an event.

• Number 1: The person who was supposed to be on duty serving as a security guard that night, whose job it was to make sure nobody broke into the morgue, was derelict in their duties. Because they were not paying attention and didn’t do their job, somebody broke into the morgue and stole the dead body.
• Number 2: The body was NOT a dead body, and the living person woke up, pushed the slab door open, got off the slab, and walked out of the morgue on their own. A person who is supposed to be dead is now walking around. But neither the security guard nor anyone else who may have been nearby saw that event.
• Number 3: The body was NOT a dead body, and the living person had some “help”. A person came to rescue them. That person opened the slab door and helped the allegedly dead person get off the slab and escape from the morgue. BUT!! … Once again, the question to be asked is: Why are there no witnesses to this event?

For Numbers 2 and 3 to be reasonably explained, the investigators consider the possibility of catalepsy. Catalepsy is a medical term/condition characterized by a trance or seizure with a loss of sensation and consciousness accompanied by rigidity of the body. In other words, the person looks dead and was erroneously declared dead, but they’re alive!

Sadly, there have been such cases where people were buried alive. If it was catalepsy then the lady sure got lucky! Her memorial services had already been held, but she had not been buried or cremated yet.

The first and obvious question the detectives asked is: WHY ARE NO OTHER BODIES MISSING? This wasn’t a supernatural event where all the dead bodies got up and started walking around. Can the fact that an alleged dead body went missing even be considered supernatural?

In defense of the security guard, there was a blackout. It was dark. He couldn’t see. Lights flickered off and on. A morgue is kind of scary when it’s dark and lights keep going off and on. Your imagination might play tricks with you. In a brief moment when the lights are on you see an empty slab. Then everything is dark again.

Then the lights flicker on and you think you see a ghost. Then the lights go off and when they come back on again, there’s nobody there. Not a dead person or a living person. The blackout also caused the CCTV not to work, so there is no video recording of what might have happened.

♦ Somebody Needs to Contact the Husband

Since the detectives called to investigate the disappearance of a body from the morgue can’t make any sense out of what the security guard is babbling about, they decide to call the husband of the deceased. The dead body belonged to a wealthy heiress. After her death, her husband stood to inherit her wealth.

One of the investigators suspects murder. He reasons that if it is murder, an autopsy would reveal that crime. However, if there is no body, there can be no autopsy, and thus the murder can not be proven. Maybe the husband arranged the removal of his wife’s dead body. Let’s ask him!

The husband is contacted and asked to come to the morgue. Where was the husband when they called? Let’s just say he was somewhere having fun now that he was a merry widower. At any rate, when the police asked him where he was, and why it took him so long to get to the morgue, he claimed he had to go to a pharmacy to get pills for a headache.

Uh-huh. The detectives begin questioning him and it’s obvious they are fishing for a reasonable explanation as to why there is a missing dead body. They’re not buying the story that a ghost is roaming around … somewhere. The husband/widower takes offense. He wants to know why he is being questioned as if he’s under suspicion when it’s obvious that somebody in the morgue is responsible!

Also … the husband doesn’t say this out loud … but the husband’s mind is filled with anxiety and fear because??  Because he knows he murdered his wife. Or … well? … he thought he murdered her. Did she not die? Is she really alive?? Did she know he was going to try to murder her and come up with a plan to thwart her death? Is she going to come back for him with a vengeance? Where the heck is his wife’s body?

OK! So if the husband truly doesn’t know what happened to his wife’s body then … he’s certainly not going to volunteer any information to incriminate himself. He’s just going to say the people who are responsible for handling bodies in the morgue are the ones who lost her body. It’s their fault and it’s their problem. They need to solve it! All of these thoughts are going through the husband’s mind.

Meanwhile, the detective in charge of the investigation is viewing the husband’s reactions as suspicious and questionable. From his point of view, it looks like the husband is trying to hide his “involvement” by shifting the blame. But the detective is certain there is something the husband is NOT saying.

There is no evidence yet, but … the detective suspects the husband of foul play because he does not appear to be grieving the loss of a beloved wife. After all, his wife didn’t just die. She vanished!

Main Characters:

• Detective Woo Joong-Sik (played by Kim Sang-Kyung, “Poong, The Joseon Psychiatrist 1 and 2”)
• (Husband) Park Jin-Han (played by Kim Kang-Woo)
• (Missing Wife) Yoon Seol-Hee (played by Kim Hee-Ae , “Queenmaker”)

Where to Watch

Viewership and Rating:

• IMDb: 6.6 out of 10 stars
• My Drama List: 7.7 out of 10 stars
• Blue-Ray.com: 7.2 out of 10 stars
• Letterboxd: 3.3 out of 5 stars
• Google users shared public ratings of 5 out of 5 stars.
• Amazon customers rated this film 4.6 out of 5 stars
• Viki viewers rated this movie 9.1 out of 10 stars

My personal rating is the same as the Viki viewers.

I did not watch the Spanish thriller that “The Vanished” was adapted from so I can not make a comparison. However, the movie immediately reeled me in. I had to know if the wife outsmarted her husband who had murderous intentions. Instantly, I concluded that the husband was an idiot. Dude! Your wife is filthy rich. If anybody can be easily disposed of … it’s you! Not her!

If anybody has the means necessary to make themselves vanish into thin air and make your life miserable, it’s a rich heiress who happens to be your wife. So! If you were going to kill her, you really should have made sure that she was dead! Because there is nothing worse than the fury of a woman scorned.

The acting was pretty good. But my high marks are for the storyline because I empathize with any wife whose husband tries to kill her. It’s fiction, but …

• ABC News did a report to answer the question: “What are the reasons behind why some husbands kill their wives?” The reasons? Who flipping cares? Murder is murder!
• The National Institute of Health collected statistics on U.S. spousal homicide rates by racial composition of marriage. What does race have to do with it? Murder is murder!
• One of the reviews mentioned that Koreans like to emphasize “class struggle” because the wife was a wealthy heiress and the husband was a lowly professor. Are you kidding me? These were two consenting adults who knew their backgrounds before the marriage and made an unforced decision to get married. Why even mention “class struggle”? So if after marriage, you realize you weren’t made for each other, your solution is MURDER?

A viewer must watch “The Vanished” to The End, regardless of its “flaws” because they need to know who will come out as a winner!

NOTE: Title Confusion

“The Vanished” is a popular title. Do not confuse this Korean drama film with the French action thriller “The Vanished” released in 2021. In this movie, a French forensics expert uncovers a dangerous criminal network in Seoul, South Korea.  This movie stars Olga Kurylenko, and Yoo Yeon-Seok, along with other popular South Korean actors and actresses.

There is also a 2006 Japanese movie with the same title about missing children.

There’s a 2020 American film this title about a family who went on vacation and their child went missing.

LINKS OF INTEREST:

• The Vanished (2018) – Review | Korean Thriller @ Fantasia 2018 | Heaven of Horror
• Fantasia 2018 Review: THE VANISHED Needs to be Seen | ScreenAnarchy
• ‘The Vanished’: Film Review | Filmart 2018 | Hollywood Reporter (“a stylish, twisty tale of guilt and revenge”)

TRAILERS/TEASERS:

World Cinema. “A Crime Can Never Be Hidden | the Vanished (2018) Movie Recap | World Cinema Review.” YouTube Video. YouTube, June 12, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=og0Kw8glMzU.

‌EMK17. “The Vanished – Trailer (사라진 밤 예고편).” YouTube Video. YouTube, March 4, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ed2KEaPLk8.

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