Movie Review: ‘The Vanishing’ Blu-ray

Review by Bradley Smith

The phrase “based on true events” is probably used by marketers to invoke curiosity and interest. After all, what could have happened in real life to merit a film adaptation? But therein lies the problem I tend to find with that phrase. Life is wonderful to experience first hand, but rarely is it cinematic. And time after time, films have been released with that marketing chestnut only to be duller than our general day to day monotony. To put it simply: we don’t watch movies because we want more of real life.

That being said, I do try to keep an open mind. After all, there have also been times when “based on true events” simply means “we used one detail of one event and everything else is fiction”. Of course, those movies are often worse, but not always. After reading up on the Flannan Isle Mystery, which is the basis for the new movie The Vanishing, it seems this meaning is more accurate. Even the opening text says “on an isolated island off the coast of Scotland three lighthouse keepers vanished without a trace”, meaning there is no way they could possibly know what happened and the story you are about to watch is largely fabricated.

Setting aside whether the story is fact or fiction, the movie is slow to start, picks up in the middle, then just drifts to some type of ending which may be meaningful to some, but I was unimpressed. The film is so starved for action in the beginning that one of the scenes finds two of the lighthouse keepers throwing dead birds at each other. Then they have a brief encounter with an alleged shipwreck victim, only to dwell on the moral ramifications of that encounter until the victim’s “friends” come looking for him.

If it is not action you are looking for, say you want a psychological thriller or drama about the final days of two of three lighthouse keepers, then this movie might be right up your alley. There is some action and excitement, but not really enough to merit the nearly two hour runtime. Oddly enough, in some ways, that runtime wasn’t enough because, possible spoiler ahead, the film’s opening text may have been misleading in the context of their story.

The Flannan Isle Mystery is intriguing in its own right. But The Vanishing squandered the virtually limitless story potential by focusing largely on a generic isolation/paranoia/madness story.