On Thursday, January 23, Ukrainian cinemas premiered the Spanish-Argentinian supernatural horror film «Restless Waters, Shivering Lights». In the review below, we sadly note a fairly obvious fact: no good cinema came out of it.
Pluses:
a few visually appealing scenes; there are also plenty of shots of beautiful scenery, including island landscapes; the action picks up in the finale, although it has little effect on the overall story;
Minuses:
The narrative is dull, uneventful, and uninteresting; the story doesn't work either as a drama about the severity of loss or as a supernatural horror; the disturbing atmosphere inherent in gloomy lighthouse films has been completely ignored here;
«Restless Waters, Shivering Lights» / Faro
Genre supernatural horror, drama
Director Angeles Hernandez
Cast Hugo Silva, Zoë Arnao, Sergio Castellanos, Irene Montalà, Maria Ribera, Carles Cuevas, Noelia Balbo
Premiere cinemas
Release Year 2025
Website IMDb
After the young Lydia’s mother died due to an accident, the girl tried to end her life. Considering her unsuccessful suicide attempt, Lydia’s father Pablo decides to temporarily live with his daughter in an old lighthouse. There, among the majestic rocks and indifferent waves of the Mediterranean Sea, and most importantly — away from strangers, both plan to cope with painful experiences and eventually find the desired peace of mind.
However, upon arrival, the troubled Lydia starts seeing ghosts, and an invisible presence of some otherworldly entity is felt inside the lighthouse. Even the acquaintance with a pleasant young man doesn’t help the girl cope with her severe psychological state. The longer she stays in this ominous place, the worse she feels. But what really troubles the suffering — mysterious forces or the fruit of her own inflamed imagination?
Although to a much lesser extent than cursed houses and estates, lighthouses have also become a good refuge for all sorts of cinematic impurities and scary events, especially in recent years.
For example, in «Cold Skin» (2017) by Xavier Gens, which was an adaptation of the same name novel by Catalan writer Albert Sanchez Piol. A lighthouse keeper played by the now deceased Ray Stevenson and his partner in the form of David Oakes faced hordes of hostile amphibians. In «The Vanishing» (2018), whose plot is based on a real story still shrouded in unsolved mystical mystery, three keepers led by Gerard Butler’s character got into big trouble. Finally, how not to mention the suffocating, dirty, and extremely oppressive «The Lighthouse» (2019) by Robert Eggers, where screen madness was compellingly embodied by Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe.
The presence of lighthouses in horrors/thrillers is not surprising at all. The gloomy plots taking place in remote tower-like structures with a powerful light source suggest a particular foreboding atmosphere of doom, and play an important role in the storytelling. Unfortunately, the creators of the «Restless Waters, Shivering Lights» Spanish-Argentinian co-production failed to take advantage of the uniqueness of the location and completely lost all its potential.
It leaves a definite impression that in this film no one really tried to scare or at least unsettle the viewer, because mostly it’s a story about the pain of loss and trying to cope with it, which only awkwardly pretends to be a typical supernatural horror. However, this approach turned out to be a failure, as it did not produce either a quality dramatic story or a creepy horror movie where doors creak, rusty water runs from the tap. Characters are constantly looking over their shoulders.
Throughout most of the runtime, unfortunate Lydia constantly sees things (often deadly jellyfish), she literally goes mad before our eyes, and her inert father skeptically watches his child and stuffs her with useless pills. Not that one would complain about the typicality of such a narrative, particularly in horror films, but the sluggish slow-paced storytelling, where the entire space is filled with the same, nullifies both the dramatic and genre efforts of the authors.
Simply put, neither the characters here are pitiable, nor does one cringe in their seat from tension.
Scattered between the scenes here and there, captivatingly filmed and picturesque landscapes of the Balearic Islands, as well as underwater shots that seem borrowed from Jacques Cousteau documentaries, dilute this concentrated hub of boredom and sadness.
As the sluggish development of events progresses, the lighthouse will increasingly deteriorate, which will evidently symbolize the inner state of the main character. In one of the scenes, submerged in water, she will remind of Kylie Minogue in the famous video «Where The Wild Roses Grow».
In the climactic act, the creators change the direction of the narrative from supernatural horror to a maniacal thriller, which, however, does not improve the poor situation at all. In the end, what emerges before the viewer is not really a lighthouse of death, but rather a lighthouse of endless boredom.
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