The Last film I saw featuring a lighthouse was The Lighthouse from visionary writer/director Robert Eggers.  Beacon is the latest movie featuring a lighthouse as part of its story. This one isn’t as good as that one was, but it has a few interesting elements and performances from its leads. One a newer actress and the other a seasoned veteran.

A girl sailor Emily (Julia Goldani Tollez) is on a boat saying she’s going to sail around the world. While sailing she encounters bad storms, and the boat capsizes. The girl is rescued by a man named Ismael (Damian Bishir), who is a lighthouse keeper. He nurses her back to help, but she has questions about the situation she’s found herself in.

She has landed on the Magdalena Islands in the South Pacific off of the coast of South America. At first glance, the lighthouse keeper is friendly and helps this young woman quite a bit. The more she explores her surroundings and gets to know her so-called savior she realizes he’s not telling the truth about her landing on this isolated island. She begins to not trust him at all which causes a lot of drama in the film.

Bishir is a good actor who’s been nominated for an Academy Award for A Better Life in 2011, He’s played a lot of different kinds of characters from Priests to Cowboys and revolutionaries. Here he plays a nice guy but you don’t necessarily know if his intentions are totally on the up and up. He’s good at playing aloof characters like this in his career. You never know what his true motivations are when he plays a lot of these characters, including this one.

The director Roxy Shih, and writer Julio Rojas infuse some interesting elements into this film. They add a horror and fantasy aspect to a movie that seemed like a straightforward thriller with memory loss. These aspects make this a movie that isn’t just by the numbers. It creates an atmosphere of suspense and mystery from beginning to end. Add in the bad weather and you have a movie with more going on than meets the eye. 

This film uses a lot of weather analogies and things of this nature to describe the situation this young woman is in, such as 70 hollers which is a wind scenario. The weather plays a big part in the story, but it’s not the only thing that defines this story. The lead actress has to give a believable performance. She is good but not great in this role. I feel a more experienced actress might have brought more to the role. I just felt I didn’t believe her as a sailor sailing around the world. It’s the one thing that brought this movie down for me.

Beacon has a lot of elements that don’t all mix, but by themselves aren’t too bad. Bishir brings an aspect of believability as a lighthouse keeper in this part of the world. Galliano Tolles on the other hand wasn’t that believable in this role for me. The situation was a perfect one to bring out a lot of suspense and mystery while keeping the audience off guard. The location and the weather were two great aspects that made this film interesting from beginning to end. There was a dark and ominous feel to the movie that made me fascinated in it while watching it.

3 stars

Dan Skip Allen