#507: The Isle (2018)
Low-budget siren chiller can’t quite hit all the right notes
Initial release: March 3, 2018
Director: Matthew Butler-Hart
There’s been something of a resurgence in period horror flicks in the last decade or so. Everything from The VVitch to The Reckoning has made their attempt at a gritty suspense thriller set in a bygone era, to varying levels of success. Matthew Butler-Hart’s The Isle slots easily into this movement, and it’s in good company, for far too many of its sister films are equally as disappointing.
Opening with a quote from Walter Copland Perry about the Sirens of Greek myth, followed by a jumbled, barely-visible sequence that in later context seems to be scenes from a shipwreck in progress, we cut to a lone boat with three men. We’re told it’s 1846, and these three men are the only survivors of a shipwreck. They’re lost, surrounded by fog, with no land in sight — until suddenly, an island appears out of the mist.
The island, somewhere off the coast of Scotland, is idyllic and beautiful, but strangely depopulated; what was once a thriving village now hosts only four people, two men and two women. The sailors are given food and shelter, but questions about getting off the island are dodged or ignored, and there are strange sounds at night.
Perhaps the closest comparison for this film would be Apostle, released around the same time. The broad similarities are there — an isolated island off the coast of Great Britain during the Victorian period, something fucked up going on, et cetera. But where Apostle succeeded, The Isle does not.
I’ve long been a proponent of the slow burn, but The Isle’s burn is more of a series of fits and starts; it never seems to really reach the powder keg ending that a slow burn would imply. The pacing is all over the place. So is the acting, as Matthew Butler-Hart seems to have had a rather hands-off approach to directing his cast that results in equal amounts of brilliant and poor performances from everyone from one scene to the next.
Where the film is at its best is in its atmosphere; this creepy little island is nothing short of gorgeous, and Butler-Hart has a good sense of lighting and shot composition. Editing, however, is kind of all over the place; certain key scenes are confusing and jumbled. That’s on top of some “interesting” choices such as Butler-Hart casting his wife Tori in a leading role with an uncomfortable — and incoherent — sex scene. As the film careens towards its finale — the moment where it gets closest to feeling like a proper mind-bender — it begins to unravel, with unconvincing special effects and an extended flashback that relies heavily on the tired trope of rape-and-(spectral)-revenge. It never convincingly links the Siren myth with the ghostly events on the island, despite its insistence on a connection.
It’s not the worst Scottish ghost story out there, but there’s certainly better — ask Shakespeare!
