The Vanishing movie review 🎥🎥

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The Vanishing is a historical mystery from 2018 that stars Gerard Butler and a lighthouse. Three lighthouse keepers on the remote Flannan Islands finds a hidden trunk of gold leading to their mysterious disappearance.

So this takes place in 1900 and it's based on a true story, at least sort of. While it is true that three lighthouse keepers disappeared, everything else that takes place in this film is complete speculation. And in small ways, this has some of the feels of Robert Eggers' The Lighthouse, where we watch men in an isolated location go slightly mad over the course of their shift.

The island is located off the northwest coast of Scotland, out in the North Atlantic, and almost immediately we get the sense of how menacing the weather can be for the lighthouse staff. In addition to Gerard Butler, there's Peter Mullen and Connor Swindells, who round out the cast of The Lighthouse Keepers. Mullen is the senior officer and the one giving orders.

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Their dynamic is odd and it's even contentious at times, where Swindells' Duncan is the lowest in seniority, so he gets the brunt of just about everything. One day after a vicious storm, the trio is out surveying the island and just take a note of any damage when they find a wrecked lifeboat and a person at the bottom of a ravine. There's also a large wooden box near the body that they later discover is filled with gold.

All along, the tensions have been really high between the three men. Mullen is grieving the loss of his family. Butler is half angry and then half joyous, which is a very odd combination.

And then Swindells is childlike in many ways, which makes him very annoying and grating at times. And because the tensions are high, there's a bunch of conflict at Bruce, leading to curt conversations that make the story feel like it's headed towards something very bad.
There's a point when some visitors arrive on the island, and that confrontation is highly tense and it's anxiety ridden. You can feel the emotions rising and the animosity that's just present. This was the point in the film that really grabbed my attention. It got me intrigued.

Up until this point, it had been somewhat engaging, but also slightly boring. Just watching the men go about their duties in semi-silent ways. But there are a few climaxes to the movie that are exciting and they're violent.

The clash between people becomes brutal and a bit nerve wracking, as we're not sure who's going to survive the struggles. And for as unlikable as the three lighthouse keepers can be, I was also rooting for them and I didn't want bad things to happen to them. And that's the crazy thing.

I was invested in a speculative story, like it was an accurate representation of what went down. There's zero proof that anything we watch actually took place. So even though this starts off with its bones being rooted in truth, it's all just a story from somebody's imagination.

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It is a fun story to watch play out, but it's also a depressing one. Because how some of the beginning of the story were just watching the trio go about their duties, the story is slow at this point.

I'd mentioned how Swindell's character gets the brunt of most of the verbal abuse from both Butler and Mullen. And because of that, it does make those other two fairly unlikable at times. And even though this is a fictional story built on a factual beginning, this doesn't have a happy ending at all.

There's actually very little about this film that's uplifting or satisfying. The storytelling is engaging for some of it, but you'll probably want to put something on afterwards that's a bit lighter and even happier. Some of the cinematography in this is awesome to view, especially as we get wide shots of either the sea or the island.

There's a point where the trio is walking along the island, looking down towards the ocean, and some of it creates just this very haunting silhouette that helps to illustrate the loneliness and isolation that they must have experienced. I would have loved to see more of the storm they experience because it wreaks a ton of havoc and damage, even killing large amounts of wildlife because of how fierce the wind was. And I think having visuals of this would make it more real. I mean, if it could be pulled off convincingly. So maybe that's why we don't really get much of that storm.

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Maybe it just couldn't be created in a way that felt legitimate. So they opted to go without rather than show something lackluster, which if that's the case, I mean, I could totally appreciate that. So this isn't a movie to drop everything in order to watch, but it does have an intriguing premise.

And even though I don't like most of the characters, they are convincing in their roles. There are so many ways this story could have been told since there's zero information on what really happened to the lighthouse keepers. So to make it a dark drama works.

And the dread that's captured is a bit haunting, even if the whole of the film isn't as memorable. My rating I on The Vanishing would be three out of five stars.

Thanks for your time!