The Isle: Sometimes, Burying The Lede Is Better

 (Technically I’m probably spoiling this film a little, but it’s nothing that you won’t have figured out before the opening credits.)

The longer I do this, the more I’m starting to see a pattern to the more mediocre films I end up writing about. It used to be the case that a crummy, generic horror film would have production values to match - cheap sets, cheaper special effects, unremarkable cinematography. But as digital video has gotten better, as editing software has gotten better, as drone cameras get more affordable, it’s become easier to put together a film that, if nothing else, looks really good. But what I’m finding is that in some ways this is laying bare a film’s shortcomings in other areas. I mean, there are still movies that look incredibly cheap and flat-out suck, but increasingly, production values aren’t a guarantee one way or another, and aren’t always enough to paper over flaws.

The Isle is a really striking example of this at work. It looks really good, but once you get past the scenery and an evocative score, it’s a bit of a narratively underwhelming mess that never really comes together.

The year is 1847, and three sailors are stranded in a rowboat off the coast of Scotland. They are Oliver Gosling (midshipman), Joe Bickley (able seaman), and Cailean Ferris (seaman). They’re arguing about their predicament and Gosling’s apparent inability to read a chart. Their ship sank after running into some rocks in a bank of heavy mist, and they might be the only survivors. They’re lost and they don’t really have any supplies, so their days are numbered. And then Cailean spies some land.

The three sailors have apparently discovered an island that lies somewhere off the western coast of Scotland, and it’s inhabited by four people - Fingal Macleod and his daughter Korrigan, and Douglas Innis and his niece Lanthe. More people used to live there, but these four are the only ones that remain. Fingal seems helpful enough, getting them warmed up and fed, but when asked where everyone else is, he’s evasive. When the sailors ask about the schedule for supply boats to the island, Fingal gives them a non-answer. When the sailors talk about setting a fire on the shore in case there are other survivors from the wreck, Fingal says he’ll set up a fire right away, and for them just to rest and not worry about it. But he doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to do so.

Elsewhere, Lanthe and Korrigan confer in whispers about how the sailors could help them.

It’s an absolutely lovely film to look at - the island has a somber beauty, rugged and raw and windswept, soundtracked by ethereal singing and mournful strings to good effect. The sea is vast and churning, shrouded in mist. Sunlight breaks through overcast skies, rays of light split by tall, thin trees, and interiors are desaturated to the point of almost being monochromatic, save for bright orange splashes of candlelight that act almost like spot color. But that only goes so far, and outside of that, there are a lot of problems. The brief is that these three sailors have landed on an island where Something Not Right happened, and might still be happening. Douglas isn’t happy to see them, tells them not to bother exploring the island because it’s a “dead isle,” its inhabitants long fled to greener pastures. But that’s not all there is to it - the seas and woods alike are shrouded in mist, and there’s a strange, unearthly whispering and singing carried by the wind. The sailors are told not to stray too far in the night. The island isn’t safe during the night. It’s set up as a mystery as the three sailors try to discover what happened on the island before it’s too late, but the mystery is spoiled almost immediately by a quote before the opening credits about the song of the siren that basically gives the game away before the film’s really even started. It’s not much of a mystery when you know it’s a film about an island and sirens before the first scene. It’s like opening Fight Club with a quote about dissociative identity disorder.

Not only are the broad strokes made obvious early, the moment-to-moment story also doesn’t really cohere. Fingal and Douglas are obviously hiding something and know more than they let on, and Lanthe and Korrigan seem to be trying to plan something under their noses, but even well into the third act it’s still not clear what this particular dynamic means. Douglas and Fingal exchange knowing glances, Lanthe and Korrigan scheme (and sometimes Korrigan goes kind of nuts, and occasionally Lanthe acts weird and her eyes go kind of milky white, both for no apparent reason), alternately helpful and hostile to Oliver, Joe and Cailean. Oliver finds a journal that is meant to shed light on events, but its entries are oblique enough that we don’t really know what any of it means (well, except for how ships keep sinking, because we already know a siren is involved somehow thanks to the opening quote). Sometimes Oliver suffers nightmares that are supposed to be creepy or haunting, but are mostly just confusing. Being evasive and cryptic isn’t necessarily the problem, but usually, evasive and cryptic starts to make more sense as the film goes on. The other shoe usually drops at a point where it impacts the plot in a meaningful way. But here, nothing comes together in a narratively meaningful way until the back half of the third act, which is primarily a series of extended flashbacks interspersed with Fingal and Douglas basically saying “okay, here’s what happened,” making the film’s narrative arc a lot of running around in circles, punctuated with an exposition dump. Which is probably the least artful way it could have been handled.

And that’s probably the best way to describe the film’s shortcomings - it is artfully shot and scored, but is otherwise artless. The acting is fine, the relationship between Oliver, Joe, and Cailean being believable for their differences in station without feeling cartoonish. But the characters suffer from being saddled with awkward dialogue - at one point, a sailor in 1847 says “this place is really weird!” and it lands with a thud. I generally prefer the dialogue in a period piece to err on the side of being less mannered or affected, but there are points here where it’s downright anachronistic. Likewise, they suffer from being saddled with improbable choices. The sailors exhibit a striking lack of judgment when the plot requires that they do so, and then they return to acting sensibly when the plot requires that as well, and the difference is glaring. At one point, Joe suggests that he and Cailean split up (which is under the circumstances a terrible idea), and then when they do and something bad happens, Joe…says it was Cailean’s idea, for reasons that are never made clear. Everyone (well, almost everyone, more on that in a bit) falls into this limbo where they aren’t caricatures, but their words and actions make it hard to buy them as actual people too.

Outside of the acting, there are some really odd directorial choices at work as well. There’s a repeated motif of characters just suddenly appearing behind other characters out of nowhere, startling them. But it’s never scary, nor does it seem intended to be. The first time it happens it’s faintly comic, and every subsequent time it becomes increasingly sillier and more distracting. Which feels very much at odds with the story as it’s being presented. Likewise, there’s a ghostly presence that figures into events, but it’s never really framed in a way that feels ghostly or strange at all. Their place in the frame evokes not so much a feeling that this people are haunted as much as there’s just someone else in the scene who wasn’t supposed to be. And finally, at the very end of the film when the aforementioned exposition dump pulls everything together, the ultimate revelation - a story of a horrible accident, something that could have been avoided were it not for the pride of fragile men - paints the antagonist not as the tragic figure the story suggested it should have been, but instead as something cartoonishly evil in the most generic way possible.

It could have been a story about sorrow and regret and the cost of grief, the cost paid with every day that you live with it. But it wasn’t. It was about an hour and a half of stuff that didn’t really track or make sense, concluded with a bunch of story all at once that made it at best a generic ghost story. The idea isn’t bad, the location is excellent, but the execution is clumsy, mechanical, and lacking emotional weight. All on top of kind of giving the whole thing away before the title.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon