Three men arrive at an otherwise uninhabited island for a six-week stint manning the lighthouse in the North Atlantic. Thomas (Peter Mullan) has recently lost his family, James (Gerard Butler) is apparently not bringing in enough to support his family, and Donald (Connor Swindells) seems like he just needed to get away.
Then Donald finds what looks like a dead body, a rowboat, and a locked chest at the bottom of a cliff.
The movie is "inspired" by the true story of 3 lighthouse keepers who disappeared from the Flannan Islands. I have no idea what, if any, basis there would be for this version of the events, but that's fine. I wouldn't have known it was based on anything real if the movie hadn't said so at the start.
It starts slow, establishing the location, that there is no land in sight in any direction. Also some of the duties that are required and what kind of set-up there is. Like how the radio set doesn't work. I really thought the fact the device that makes the light turn leaks mercury was going to be more significant than it was.
It also becomes apparent quickly some of the fault lines between the three men. Donald seems to have gotten hired on James' recommendation, and while Donald is sometimes curious and eager to learn, he's also not much of a self-starter, and kind of a goof at times. Or maybe he's just younger and less mature than the other two. He goes from being very concerned that someone is going to come looking for the dead man and his chest, to seeming totally surprised when. . .someone comes looking for the dead man and his chest.
For the first half of the movie, James seems the most stable. The one who humors Donald's flights of stupidity, or who coaxes James inside when he's yelling drunkenly at shadows. Which is why, when things go south, it's the decline in James' mentality that is the worst sign. Gerard Butler spends at least the last 45 minutes with a thousand yard stare. I'd swear they did something to his eyes, contacts or something digital, to make them look almost cloudy and enhance the effect. He's somewhere far away from the other two.
There are a lot of shots of one character peering through a window at another, or simply watching them from off to one side or slightly behind them. The camera likes to put one of them in perfect focus, but make the other slightly blurry, make you wonder if these three are seeing each other clearly past their own problems. Mullan has this perpetual squint to his face, like he's spent his entire life having salt thrown in his face by the sea. It doesn't make him seem very gentle, and even when he's trying to talk around James or Donald, it doesn't quite work. There's not much comfort to be had in his words. When Donald confides that a girl he liked said she wasn't to talk to him because he's, 'a bastard boy,' Thomas's response is along the lines of, "well then they can't complain if you do turn out to be a bastard."
Probably not what the boy needed to hear, but that's part of the problem. Each of them is falling apart before they got to the lighthouse, so none of them are capable of holding each other together. It's a decently tense movie, even knowing they all have to "vanish" somehow, because you don't know how or why or in what order.
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