Director: Kristoffer Nyholm
Writers: Celyn Jones, Joe Bone
Stars: Peter Mullan, Gerard Butler, Emma King
A trio of keepers arrive at their station for a six week stint at an isolated lighthouse in the middle of the North Sea: Thomas and James have been doing the job for some years, Donald is a newbie, a somewhat raffish youngster who appears little suited for the task. They have enough supplies, but the radio is broken, and violent storms are commonplace. After one of these they discover a washed-up lifeboat carrying an apparently dead man and a locked wooden chest, which turns out to contain several gold ingots. The man, however, isn’t as dead as he seems; and more worryingly he has some associates who are on his trail…
There’s something in the air when it comes to movies set in lighthouses at the moment. A long time ‘occasional’ setting for films and TV shows (the Dr. Who story The Horror of Fang Rock springs to mind, as well as the 1999 slasher movie Lighthouse), we’ve had in rapid succession: Chris Crow’s The Lighthouse (2016), Xavier Gens’s Cold Skin (2017) and Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse (2019). All of them take as their starting point the mysterious disappearance of three keepers from the isolated Flannan Isles lighthouse in 1900 and, although they develop the story in very different ways, all of them feature copious amounts of bad weather, madness, pipe smoking, woolly jumper wearing and murder.
The Vanishing is a solid 2018 entry in the cycle. Like all the films it features a grizzled older character (Peter Mullen) and a younger ‘apprentice’ (Connor Swindells) who finds the isolation particularly hard going. As opposed to the other films, it also throws in a third character, Gerard Butler’s James, who sits somewhere between the two: at first he appears the most level-headed of the characters, a family man who mixes practicality and empathy, but as time goes on he proves to be the one of the trio who is most hard hit by the events they’re drawn into.
In terms of story, it’s (somewhat weirdly) closer to Cold Skin than the other films, largely because it pits the isolated keepers against an external force: Lovecraftian sea creatures in Cold Skin, dodgy Norwegians here. Although these external forces are dangerous, it’s ultimately the impact they have on the relationships between the central trio which are more important, a familiar ploy from films such as Shallow Grave and A Simple Plan, both of which also revolve around former friendships fragmenting after the discovery of ‘lost’ stashes of loot (and, more importantly, betraying their own morals by deciding to keep it).
Although hardly ground-breaking and, it must be said, relentlessly glum, it’s a decent film. Experienced TV director Kristoffer Nyholm does a good job of capturing the windswept nature of the location, bathing everything in wintry colours and a palpable sense of dread. The story moves slowly, but it does a good job of developing the tension and includes a couple of decent shocks. Most of all, though, it’s worth watching for the performances, which are uniformly excellent. Peter Mullen is always a pleasure, and this sees him at his best; but the real revelation is Gerard Butler, who does a very good job with an atypical role (he also produced, so this was obviously a project close to his heart).
Rating: 7/10
