Lighthouse (1999)
- Andrew Smith
- 21 hours ago
- 5 min read
"The brightest light. Your darkest fears."
Plot
A prison transport ship carrying some notorious criminals, including serial killer Leo Rook, runs around during a storm and the crew are forced to abandon ship. The few survivors, a mixture of guards and prisoners, manage to take shelter at a nearby lighthouse but Rook also managed to escape from the ship before it sank. Now with no way off the island, the survivors are slowly picked off one-by-one.
Review
A British film with a prolonged production? That's not something unusual in an era where it seems to be harder and harder for talented British filmmakers to get their foot onto the bottom rung of the movie making ladder. When you don't have massive Hollywood studio backing, you are constantly pausing production to hunt for bridge financing. You shoot a little bit, you run out of money, you spend six months begging for another influx of cash, and then you try to get the cast back together. Lighthouse started development in 1994 with some funding from the Arts Council, began shooting in 1998, was eventually finished by 1999, was released in the US in 2000 as Dead of Night, and finally 'came home' for the first time in 2002 for a cinematic release. That is an eight-year odyssey, just to get a modest horror film onto a domestic screen so it's a good job that, for the most, Lighthouse comes out as respectable as it does. Well, as respectable as another generic American slasher flick could be. If there’s one thing that Lighthouse proves, is that the British could make something as routine as the Americans were churning out. The fact that the director, Simon Hunter, managed to deliver a final product that emerges as respectable, well at least for the first hour, is a minor miracle in itself.
Lighthouse's main strength is its cracking location. The lighthouse and surrounding island are the perfect places to set a horror film. Set at night, the film does a great job of turning this environment into an intimidating, inhospitable place where the only light source is the constantly rotating lighthouse beam. Inside is no better, with damp, dingy rooms and spiralling iron staircases leading to all manner of possibilities for the characters to play hide and seek with the killer. At times, director Hunter is in danger of lavishing too much style into the film. We're talking lingering shots of the desolate landscape, heavy reliance on diegetic sound like dripping water and howling wind, and this really oppressive, slow-burn dread. But this is a slasher after all, not some art house flick. Once this gets a little overbearing, Lighthouse ditches it all in favour of more routine slasher trickery.
It's these early scenes with the characters exploring the island, blissfully unaware that Rook has beaten them there, which are the film's strongest point. Before the decapitating gets underway in earnest, Lighthouse protracts the tension with a series of scenes which will get right under your skin: the highlight scene being where the ship's alcoholic captain ventures off in search of the toilet only to have the killer enter a few minutes later, unaware of the potential victim hiding in the cubicle. What follows is a nerve-wracking few minutes where the captain peeks underneath the cubicle to see a pair of blood-splattered feet pacing up and down. It relies entirely on implied violence rather than explicit gore. We know what those boots are capable of, and we are trapped in that tiny space with the captain just waiting for the boots to stop moving and turn toward the door.
It's good to see a British slasher try and deviate from the norm a little by choosing not to populate the film with teenage characters, instead giving us a selection of adult characters to root for (with a bunch of British character actors assuming the roles). Unfortunately, just because they're adults doesn't mean to say that we're going to like them any better and Lighthouse seems to go out of its way to make these survivors as bland and as lacklustre as possible. The leads, James Purefoy and Rachel Shelley, are saddled with particularly worthless characters. Thankfully, despite the victims providing little in the way of human entertainment, Christopher Adamson's Leo Rook killer more than makes up for the short-change. He's a sinister-looking character, physically imposing to boot, and more than capable (and willing) to kill and decapitate his victims. He likes to keep the heads as trophies. No attempt is made to give him any sort of back story other than the fact he's a notorious killer but once he escapes, there's no real need to turn him onto a multi-layered character – the sympathetic monster which so many horror films try to turn their antagonists into. He's a killer, plain and simple, in the classic mould of Michael Myers. The survivors who manage to get to shore are populated by some reliable character actors such as Paul Brooke and Don Warrington who add plenty of class in the minor roles.
While an unstoppable force paired with a brilliant location works wonders for the first half of the film, that exact combination leads directly to Lighthouse’s fatal flaw in its second half. Novelty value of the setting aside, Lighthouse falls into many of the same baffling pitfalls as its American cousins. Once the first couple of kills have taken place, Lighthouse drifts into a repetitive series of "is he there, or isn't he?" moments where the survivors are trying to guess where Rook is hiding. The atmosphere and tension from the first half gives way to predictable plotting, unnecessary explosions and forced romantic sub-plots. The script just completely forgets the established grounded reality of the first act and tries to hit standard Hollywood beats. The dull characters begin to make silly decisions such as splitting up or venturing outside in the dark. As the number of survivors starts to dwindle and the creativity dries up, Rook begins to grow stronger and stronger, surviving the inevitable electrocution, burning and stabbing that the Final Girl throws his way. No amount of gore and rolling heads can make up for the stupidity and shoulder-shrugging nature of the script in the second half of the film. It’s a sign that the script ran out of ideas too soon because when a writer or director realises they can no longer sustain genuine psychological suspense, which is notoriously difficult to maintain for ninety minutes, they panic and fall back on the visual spectacle of violence and noise. They mistakenly equate a louder film with a scarier film. Lighthouse was doing so well in keeping everything grounded; saturated in a foreboding dread that kept getting worse as Rook picked them off one-by-one.
Final Verdict
Lighthouse is a slightly better-than-routine slasher, a bit more violent and gritty than most, set inside a novel location and with some decent technical skill surrounding it. Due to the nature of the material, it is never able to break out in the way that it should, and the sub-genre conventions end up swamping the film towards the end. A solid effort from the Brits but nothing that will be rocking the foundations of the sub-genre. It punches above its weight visually, for sure, but it cannot overcome its narrative shortcomings. Because of the total collapse into cliches in the second half, it never breaks out to become a classic which is a shame because I wanted to like Lighthouse a lot more than I actually did.
 |
Lighthouse Also Known As: Dead of Night Director(s): Simon Hunter Writer(s): Simon Hunter, Graeme Scarfe (story) Actor(s): James Purefoy, Rachel Shelley, Christopher Adamson, Paul Brooke, Don Warrington, Christopher Dunne, Bob Goody, Pat Kelman Duration: 95 mins |  |
|---|
