The fictional country in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes is Bandrika.
Bandrika is an invented Eastern European Alpine country used as the setting for the film’s opening section. Iris Henderson is traveling by train from Bandrika toward London when an avalanche disrupts the journey and strands the passengers at a hotel.
The country helps Hitchcock create a politically tense but deliberately vague European setting. The film was released in 1938, when audiences were especially alert to stories involving borders, authoritarian governments and disappearing people. Its plot follows Iris and musicologist Gilbert Redman as they search for Miss Froy, an elderly English governess whose disappearance most passengers deny.
Bandrika is sometimes spelled or rendered as “Vandreka” in reference works, but Bandrika is the standard answer associated with the film. It is also commonly confused with Ruritania, the fictional monarchy from Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, or Syldavia, the country from Tintin. The film adapts Ethel Lina White’s 1936 novel The Wheel Spins.