As characters tell each other over and over throughout Beacon, “there are no dangerous seas, just dangerous sailors.” The same could be said of allusions to other films: In and of themselves, they are harmless, providing a fantastic set of tools to build a unique story, but used poorly, they can wreck a film. Roxy Shih’s new yarn, a tale of obsession and madness on a rocky shore, doesn’t quite wash itself up chasing the successes of Robert Eggers’ New England Folk Tale The Lighthouse, but it certainly gets caught in its wake.
Wrecked
Emily (Julia Goldani Telles, Looks That Kill) is following in her family’s footsteps solo-circumnavigating the globe by sea the old fashioned way. With no GPS or fancy equipment to aid her, she sets sail, cheerily offering a piece of chocolate to Neptune (sneaking a taste herself). Almost immediately, she crashes ashore on a wildly remote island, entirely deserted but for a bearded lighthouse keeper named Esmael (Demián Bichir, Che, The Nun), and a delicate battle of wits begins as the two tentatively try to feel each other out. Soon, talk of mermaids and too much time on their hands cracks their fragile alliance, and the expected cabin fever begins in earnest.
The film is at its best when its two actors are given the space to play this pas de deux gently. Flipping the gender dynamics of The Lighthouse is a scenario ripe with opportunities for tension and fear, and the director explores them well in Beacon’s middle passages. In scenes of Emily and Esmael working out bathroom arrangements or tending each other’s wounds, the knowledge of the petite young woman’s utter vulnerability in the face of their mutual isolation makes things suitably queasy and uncertain, like something pulled from a Kitty Green film. Shih wrings some effective twists out of her story, too, occasionally succeeding in knocking us slightly off-balance long after we believe we have our sealegs: Is Emily as vulnerable as she seems?
That said, Beacon sits painfully deep in the shadow of The Lighthouse, a comparison that starkly reveals its flaws: Telles‘ Emily is both too allegorical a figure and given too many obvious character traits (she, we are told “has trouble trusting herself” and thinks her father was “repressed”), while even Bichir‘s nuanced performance as the unreliable narrator of her days, full of tenderness and danger, can only hold a candle to Willen Dafoe‘s turn in the same thick rubber shoes.
Where that film’s delirious heights come crashing down into floods of vomit and blue verbiage, here, when tensions run high, fights feel forced, even grating, instead of virtuosic–– “Shut the fuck up!” isn’t quite as compelling an insult as cursing Triton to “choke ye, engorging your organs til’ ye turn blue and bloated with bilge and brine and can scream no more!”
Conclusion:
This critique would likely feel unfair in a film that wasn’t so obviously modeled after Eggers‘ work, from the most obvious broad strokes like character dynamics, scenario, and structure (including the blowout drunken fight at the end of act 2), to the smaller things, like specific bits of mermaid lore or ominously placed hallucinatory dreams. Here, though, the film begs this comparison, leading to the inevitable conclusion that it simply can’t stack up, even at its admittedly compelling best. But for the viewer who doesn’t mind overt imitation–– or hasn’t seen The Lighthouse!–– Beacon, with its twists, turns, and choppy seas, may hold some interest.
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