This film is very, very loosely based on a French film called Spoorloos, done in 1988. In that film the fiancé of a man is abducted from a roadside stop, leading to his frantic 3 year search and public campaign to find out what happened to her. It is a haunting tale of loss and random evil, mixed in with obsessive guilt and fixation. By watching Breakdown and Spoorloos you can see the difference between the European genre of exposing human frailties, without redemption, and the American genre of righteous retribution. The American film is by far the less intriguing.. being no more than a little nuanced potboiler of good over evil, with the usual facile stereotypes you find in Hollywood films, and of course, car chase. Spoorloos delves into the complexities of the human condition Breakdown can only poorly imitate.