The Disappearance 1977

Jay Mallory [David Hemmings] is a contract killer based in Montréal who returns to his downtown apartment on a cold winter day to find his wife, Celandine [Francine Racette], missing. Their marriage has been intense and stormy at times, leaving Mallory to wonder if she left of her own accord. Yet the Organization’s top contact, Burbank [David Warner], hints that her disappearance could be connected to Mallory’s most recent assignment, and then, without warning, Burbank himself vanishes too. The sense of being drawn into something larger than a personal crisis grows heavier as Mallory contemplates the possibility that he is being watched or set up by the organization that hires him.

The Organization soon assigns Mallory another job, this time in Suffolk, England. He is given only fragments of information: a target whose identity remains a mystery and a thread tied to Celandine’s vanishing. The lack of clarity unsettles him, and he suspects a betrayal or a trap, yet he continues with the mission to uncover the truth and perhaps find Celandine along the way. He is told that his missing wife may have had an affair with an Englishman named Roland Deverell, a detail that deepens the mystery and raises questions about how far the Organization will go to protect its interests.

In London, Mallory meets Atkinson [John Hurt], who hands him a weapon described as a “shy” for carrying out the assassination. He then travels to rural Suffolk, driving through quiet countryside that feels almost deliberately insulated from the violence embedded in his line of work. As the investigation unfolds, Mallory becomes wary that the Organization intends to retire him if he proves unreliable, a looming threat that colors every step he takes. He visits the home of Catherine [Virginia McKenna], the wife of Roland Deverell, who paints a portrait of Deverell as a serial womanizer, though she insists that his affair with Celandine appeared singularly focused. The information gatekeeper Atkinson relays the target’s name to Mallory—Roland Deverell—adding a personal spark to the professional mission and pushing Mallory toward a confrontation he did not anticipate.

Mallory breaches the large country house where Deverell is said to reside and is confronted by the man himself, who turns the encounter around. Deverell announces that he has anticipated Mallory’s arrival and claims that Celandine had been involved with him for a long time, that she left England the day before Mallory’s arrival, and that she orchestrated the hit to free herself from the marriage and from Mallory’s orbit within the Organization. When Deverell attempts to shoot Mallory, Mallory fires first and kills him. The killing brings Mallory back to London, and from there he returns to Montréal, where Celandine reappears in his life.

Back in Montréal, Celandine explains that her involvement with Deverell stemmed from mounting frustration within their strained marriage. She reveals that she used the Organization’s channels and intermediaries to set up the assassination of Deverell, not as a betrayal of Mallory but as a calculated move to gain her own freedom from the life she had with him and from the Organization’s grip. Mallory processes the revelation and, for a moment, seems to accept the arrangement, and the pair momentarily reconnect in a quiet, intimate moment.

The new sense of mutual understanding does not last. The following morning, Mallory sets out to cook breakfast for Celandine, buying groceries on the way. As he steps outside his apartment with the bags, an unseen sniper ends his life with a single shot, leaving Celandine inside and the room suddenly heavy with the weight of unresolved schemes and broken trust. The film closes on a stark, unsettling note, leaving the fate of both Mallory and Celandine shrouded in ambiguity and the lingering question of who truly controls the dangerous web they inhabit.