The Vanishing (2019)

The Vanishing, directed by Kristoffer Nyholm, concerns three lighthouse keepers on a remote Scottish island in 1900 who find a boat, a body, and a wooden chest that does not belong to them. Gerard Butler, Peter Mullan, and Connor Swindells spend the running time growing beards, distrusting one another, and discovering that gold bars are an excellent accelerant for homicide. The film draws on the unresolved disappearance of the Flannan Isles crew, a genuine historical mystery, though the script supplies its own answers with grim efficiency. It is a thriller about greed and guilt, and it has no interest in being anything else.

This is worth stating plainly, because the film offers nothing for the contemporary cultural ledger. The principals are white men of a certain rugged constitution. There is no romantic subplot, no LGBTQ presence, no feminist counterweight, no discussion of race on an island that contains nobody to discuss it with. Thomas mourns a dead wife and children, and James unravels under the weight of what he has done, but the film treats these as grief and breakdown, not as conditions requiring representation. The gold is a plot device, not a thesis on wealth. The weather is bad because the Hebrides are windy.

The result is a film of salt spray and poor decisions, competently made and entirely untroubled by the anxieties of its release year. It premiered at Sitges and reached British cinemas in 2019, a moment when many films were busy explaining themselves to the audience. This one simply drowns a man and sails away. We are left with a modest, well-acted exercise in dread, and a classification file that will remain almost entirely blank. The keepers vanish, as history insists they did, and the credits roll without a single lesson attached to their going.

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