The Vanished, actor Peter Facinelli’s sophomore feature directorial outing, starts with an Emily Dickinson poem, indicating what we’re about to witness will be a high-minded meditation on loss and grief. In reality, the movie is a schlocky, adult-oriented thriller about the lengths a couple go to when their child goes missing during a camping trip at an RV park. While those parents, played by Thomas Jane and Anne Heche, should be sympathetic, they make a series of increasingly preposterous decisions that make them hard to feel bad for. In the meantime, everyone else in the film is either a suspect or a law-enforcement officer who doesn’t seem particularly effective at their job. All this is capped by an ending out of an M. Night Shyamalan movie, which makes the rest of the film feel like one big misdirection.

The Vanished begins with long-married couple Wendy (Heche) and Paul (Jane) Michaelson arriving at a secluded RV park with their 10-year-old daughter, Taylor (Kk and Sadie Heim), and their dog, Lucky. As they attend to other chores, Taylor vanishes without a trace. But it’s just a few days before Thanksgiving and almost no one is around, narrowing the suspect pool to a very small list: There’s the surly RV Park owner, Tom (John D. Hickman), the twitchy, socially awkward groundskeeper, Justin (Alex Haydon), and the young, childless couple in the only other RV on the property, Miranda (Aleksei Archer) and Eric (Kristopher Wente).

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There’s also an escaped convict on the loose in the vicinity, which heightens the stakes for Wendy and Paul, even though the Sheriff (Jason Patric) tells them the possibility of the convict going out of his way to kidnap a child is minimal. Still, when the Sheriff doesn’t let the pair participate in the search for Taylor that evening, the Michaelsons decide to take matters into their own hands. While conducting their own search, they come across a camper in the woods, who of course, they find suspicious, and soon they’ve killed him with his own gun. This all happens within the first 25 minutes of the film, and from there things just become more ridiculous as the desperate parents find the slightest reason to believe everyone around them is the kidnapper, leading to more questionable decisions and more tragedy. Meanwhile, the seemingly bumbling cops haven’t turned up any evidence of Taylor and remain blissfully ignorant of Wendy and Paul’s activities.

There are moments where the movie seems to be trying to explore the depths of the Michaelsons' despair -- and in case we missed it, there’s a scene with a grief counselor (Gregory Harrison) who articulates what the couple is feeling and what they should do to get through this challenging time. Yet this is all vastly overshadowed by the over-the-top plot and the actors’ melodramatic performances. When it comes down to it, Wendy and Paul aren’t especially pleasant people to spend time with, and Heche and Jane’s performances don’t soften them or make them more bearable. While Heche has a few moments of genuine terror and grief, as Wendy, she’s often histrionic, overreacting or falling apart depending on what’s happening. Meanwhile, as Paul, Jane is controlling and sleazy, and while the couple often comes across as co-dependent, they also don’t have any real chemistry.

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This, along with the way the plot piles on incident after incident makes The Vanished feel more like a made-for-TV movie than a serious drama. The movie also has a slightly off-kilter tone, which somewhat foreshadows that something strange is going on here, a fact the film’s third-act twist confirms. However, whether you have your suspicions or the twist comes out of left-field, the ending casts the whole story in a different light, making it clear just how much of what Facinelli’s shown us has functioned as a Red Herring. It's the kind of twist that might completely annoy some viewers, while others might be intrigued enough to want to go back and watch the movie again -- however, the latter group is likely to override that instinct when considering how unrewarding the first hour and forty-five minutes of the film were to sit through.

The Vanished does its best to entertain, yet with two central protagonists who ultimately are more like villains, the movie never really works. Despite the big-name actors and twisty plot, the movie’s both too extreme and not genuinely diverting enough to overcome that basic issue, making for a story that might have been fascinating but ends up feeling like a slog.

The Vanished, written and directed by Peter Facinelli, stars Thomas Jane, Anne Heche and Jason Patric. It will be released in select theaters, digital and on demand on Friday, Aug. 21.

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