What happened to Taylor in 'The Vanished'? The mystery thriller's ending explained

Peter Facinelli's mystery thriller The Vanished that released in the second half of 2020 is garnering attention again. The movie follows the story of a couple that loses their 10-year-old daughter Taylor amidst a family trip. With little to no help from the local police, the couple decides to take the matter into their own hands. What happens to the daughter? Who took Taylor? Beware of the spoilers if you haven't watched the movie yet.

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What happened to Taylor in The Vanished?

The Vanished has earned its name as a movie that is nowhere close to what fans imagined it to be. The movie starts with a middle-aged couple Wendy and Paul set out on a family vacation together with their young daughter Taylor and their pet dog. Everything appears to be happy and perfect until one day, Wendy finds out that Taylor has gone missing from their lakeside RV camp. A sense of tension and fear builds up as the couple begins a frantic search for their daughter in and around the site. The couple approaches the police and the media in the hope of finding their daughter as soon as possible. When all fails, they decide to find their daughter themselves. To make matter worse, amidst their quest to find their missing daughter, they accidentally kill a man.

One drawback of such movies is that the answer is rather easy. They either successfully find their daughter or they don't, right? But this movie isn't that. The Vanished takes the most unexpected turn towards the end leaving the audience shocked.

In the closing moments of the film, it is revealed that the Sheriff heading the investigation discovers an old picture of the couple where they're posing in front of the Twin Towers. What is intriguing about the picture is that Wendy appears pregnant during the time when Twin Towers still existed. The Sheriff fails to comprehend how the couple's daughter is only 10-years-old when the picture easily dates back to 17 years of time.

After learning this, the cop gets in touch with Paul's brother to find out the truth. He learns that Taylor was dead years ago as she drowned in a lake. The couple, on the other hand, keeps getting manic episodes where they re-enact their old memories with Taylor. 

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The Vanished Ending

Towards the end, we see that both Paul and Wendy are slipping into depression. However, Paul pulls himself together and finally accepts the truth of his daughter's death as he throws her belongings away in the trash. Just when we think that the normalcy is returning, the couple plays an old video of their daughter and start enacting it again, suggesting to the audience that they're deep into the loop of grief to ever come out of it again.

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