Based on a real-life mystery in which three lighthouse keepers disappeared from their station in 1900, Kristoffer Nyholm’s thriller The Vanishing fuses the tough and tender. The setting—an isolated island—is claustrophobically constrained, and the drama is scaled to chamber size, fixed mostly on three men: Donald (Connor Swindells), the callow youth; James (Gerard Butler), the affable family man who needs the work; and Thomas (Peter Mullan), their elder leader. The latter is a man of few words, which is too bad because Mullan’s greatest asset as an actor is his basso brogue, as craggy as the island setting; his voice alchemizes dialogue into music.
The men set out for a six-week term at the remote beacon, relieving others who appear as if they’ve just seen a ghost or become ghosts themselves: ashen, with dark circles under the eyes, portending things to come. The new arrivals tend the light, and maintenance keeps them busy, the mundane tasks broken up by the bonhomie of men united by work: mealtimes, singalongs, cups of whiskey. The workaday is interrupted, though, by a storm, which brings to the island a shattered lifeboat, its half-dead but deadly passenger, and his mysterious treasure chest. They kill him in self-defense, but, of course, men come looking for him and his cargo, leading to violent confrontation.
For a while, it feels like the disappearance of the lighthouse keepers will be explained by the emergence of these new characters, but the third act reaches the story’s known conclusion via unexpected paths. The Vanishing settles into an emotional drama about men struggling with the psychological aftereffects of violence, slowly losing their grip on reality and turning against each other. The suspense tightens like the fork-tautened noose in the film that’s used to crack a crabshell and, later, a man’s neck. The allure of the real Flannan Isles case is its vague but evocative details—a stopped clock, an overturned chair, unmade beds, and closed doors—and Nyholm’s film honors that mystery by maintaining it for as long as possible.
Butler, looking rawer and puffier than usual, gets to showcase his acting chops in a way he doesn’t in films like Geostorm. At first, he nails that valuable movie-star trick of embodying the everyman many audience members relate to, a sort of blankness that avoids being bland. But later, he goes deeper and darker, mentally unraveled by all the killings, unable to cope with the bloodshed. The Vanishing seems truly troubled by its action violence in a way that many similar thrillers aren’t, as the characters, steeped in old-fashioned masculinity, are crushed by its weight until they, quite literally, disappear.
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