ON Boxing Day 1900, the lighthouse tender Hesperus arrived at the Flannan Isles — the site of one of Britain’s most remote lighthouses.

The Hesperus had attempted to set sail six days before — but the severity of the Outer Hebrides weather put paid to that. A steamer on a passage from Philadelphia to Leith had logged that the lamp appeared not to have been lit in poor weather conditions, and lighthouse authorities had been sent to investigate.

What they found would form the basis of a mystery that remains unsolved to this day. The station’s flag had disappeared, and there was no sign at all of the three resident lighthouse keepers. Had they perished, or escaped to a new life?

The story is reimagined by Danish director Kristoffer Nyholm, who worked on the second series of acclaimed whodunnit The Killing. The new flick is a powerful psychological thriller which tackles masculinity, trauma and inter-generational relations. Where it takes the story is extreme, but it’s only the latest episode in a century of artists grappling with the Flannan Isle mystery.

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson’s 1912 ballad Flannan Isle was perhaps the first, playing a part in defining the event’s legendary status. The poem referred to “a table spread / For dinner, meat, and cheese and bread / But, all untouch’d; and no-one there.” Its own theory proposed “Alarm had come,” and the men “in haste / Had risen” — but in actual fact, the kitchen was discovered clean and bare.
The prog-rockers Genesis recorded The Mystery of the Flannan Isle Lighthouse as a demo tape in 1967. The lyrics are clumsy and cliched: “On the finest day the sea is black / They say no one has ever come back from there” but the melody surprisingly refreshing. But then again Genesis in 1967 was a promising — if limited — public school band, yet to be propelled to undue stardom by fellow Carthusian, pop star and producer Jonathan King, now a convicted child sex offender.

Ten years later in the 1977 Doctor Who serial Horror at Fang Rock, Tom Baker’s Doctor quotes the Gibson poem at the conclusion of a story with deep echoes of the Flannan Isles mystery. By 1994 Siouxsie Sioux would team up with the French composer Hector Zazou in a new adaptation of the poem.

It’s no surprise that a mysterious disappearance in such a remote, atmospheric setting should inspire creative voices. The new film, with exemplary performances from Gerard Butler, Peter Mullan and Connor Swindells, takes a greater risk in its dark imagining of how the men came to leave their post. There’s always a potential for such additions to real events to come out rather crass, but Nyholm pulls it off.

I was discussing another such reworking, Edna O’Brien’s The Little Red Chairs, with friends this week. The acclaimed novelist imagines a character based on Radovan Karadzic practicing as a sex healer on Ireland’s west coast. A bit far fetched, my interlocutor remarked. But, I countered, no more far fetched than Karadzic practicing alternative therapy while in hiding. Similarly, The Vanishing demonstrates how one miscalculation can spiral into a mess of depravity.

It often feels like we live in the age of the biopic, with so many cinematic releases attempting to cash in on celebrity followings. If more filmmakers were prepared to be a little less rigid in their dealings with real life, we’d probably have more failures — but fewer films of bland predictability.