This misty old mystery will grip you
The Vanishing (15) Verdict: Solid Hebridean-set thriller
IN 1900, three lighthouse keepers disappeared without trace off the Flannan Isles in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides.
It is a little-known mystery, certainly much less notorious than the disappearance of three schoolgirls and their teacher during a picnic at Hanging Rock, in Australia, in the very same year.
The irony is that the Hanging Rock mystery is make-believe. The Flannan lighthouse keepers really did disappear, and The Vanishing is an entirely imagined account of what might have happened to them.
Danish director Kristoffer Nyholm, and writers Celyn Jones and Joe Bone, move the story forward to 1938. The three men are Thomas ( Peter Mullan), James ( Gerard Butler) and Donald (Connor Swindells).
Thomas is a grizzled veteran, a man of few words, blighted, as it turns out, by a desperate personal tragedy. James is an amiableseeming cove and Donald a chirpy novice.
They have a six- week shift stretching out in front of them, and for the first part of the film, it’s easy to feel as if we do, too.
We get jolly good looks at the light mechanism, the knitwear, the beards, the weather. And again in reverse order.
But a flock of dead seagulls presages a change of tone and a quickening of the narrative. Soon, the keepers find a man washed ashore, presumed dead.
He has a locked wooden chest with him, but as Robert Louis Stevenson so nearly wrote, three men looking in a dead man’s chest is a recipe for disaster.
There is something of great value inside, and a pair of roguish Scandinavian sailors duly come looking for it, not believing for a second Thomas’s explanation of its whereabouts.
From that point, gradually, and very effectively, Nyholm cranks up the tension. His vast TV experience, on shows such as The Killing, and Taboo, serves him well.
So does his cast; it’s never easy to rip your eyes off Mullan, such a powerful actor, but it’s good to be reminded that there’s more to Butler, too, than just a big torso and a bad script. And Swindells, in his feature-film debut, isn’t outclassed either.
The Vanishing unfolds as both a conventional and psychological thriller, and, at times, the director gets stuck between the two. Some of the events towards the end raise more questions than they settle, and James’s speedy transformation from salt- of- the- earth type to unbalanced loose cannon feels a little forced.
But there’s plenty to admire, nonetheless. Unless you’re hoping for a dash of the supernatural, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed with this explanation of the Flannan Isles mystery — even if you didn’t know there was one.