[Tribeca 2024] BEACON -- Dull Psychological Thriller Destined To Be Lost in the Sea of Content

Review by Sean Boelman

Directed by Roxy Shih and written by Julio Rojas, the psychological thriller Beacon feels like the type of movie that feels destined to end up in the annals of a streaming library, discovered by a bored subscriber looking for something late at night while scrolling social media on their phones. It’s a high-concept, technically competent, but altogether unmoving film that fails to give the audience any reason to get invested.

Beacon follows a young sailor on an ambitious solo trip who wrecks her ship and gets rescued by a lighthouse keeper, only for the duo to descend into madness. It’s a classic set-up for a psychological thriller — hell, look no further than Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse — but its overwhelming simplicity keeps Beacon from ever instilling the same sense of dread or paranoia as the films it borrows from.

The most frustrating thing about the film, though, is how little the characters’ arcs make sense. Are we supposed to believe that these two people who have chosen solitary occupations — a solo sailor and a lighthouse keeper — are driven mad by isolation? Their personalities, or at least what little personality they are given, don’t fit.

It is under these conditions that Beacon begins to completely unravel itself. There’s conflict, but little of it is of any consequence. For a psychological thriller that deals so heavily in paranoia and mistrust, the characters are swift to forgive one another when they do terrible things. Like so many other aspects of the film, it just doesn’t make any sense.

Atmospherically, director Roxy Shih does her best with the material she is given. The cinematography and production design do a good job of creating a sense of claustrophobia, even if the visuals are derivative of virtually every other psychological thriller you’ve seen. Shih is able to build the sense of tension that the narrative needs for propulsion, but the script lets her down.

However, at a certain point, one begins to wonder what writer Julio Rojas even had to say with this script. Is it a Sartre-esque satire on the ways in which society drives itself apart? Or are we giving Rojas too much credit by assuming he has anything to say at all? Maybe this is just intended to be a lean exercise in atmosphere — and even in that regard, it’s a failure. 

And with a film like this, where the cast is entirely limited to two people, it is paramount that those performances be strong. Demián Bichir and Julia Goldani Telles do not deliver in the lead roles. Bichir is at least somewhat entertaining to watch, but his performance feels far too big — almost as if it is ripped out of a different film with more exciting conflict.

With all this in mind, it becomes clear that Beacon is no shining light in the sea of festival thrillers. Psychological thrillers need to create a feeling of dread to be successful, or at the very least menace, but Julio Rojas’s script is so devoid of originality that it cannot achieve either. At least it’s merciful enough to be a mere 90 minutes, meaning it isn’t asking viewers to waste much of their time.

Beacon is screening at the 2024 Tribeca Festival, which runs June 5-16 in New York City.

Rating: 2/5