With her husband constantly sick (or worse), it’s up to Abigail to maintain her lighthouse on the coast of 19th-century Maine.

Then a Scandinavian sailor washes up near her, upsetting the local order. Abigail is played by Erica Fae, who also wrote and directed this thin story, based on anecdotes about real-life light keepers. She embodies the part with stolidity but, unfortunately, reads every line like it’s from an NPR news story. It’s her film, and she expects no better from the rest of the cast, which is arrayed in historical tableaux of rugged men and Simon Legree–type villains. There are some strong images, but the dramatic staging is consistently bad; the whole thing plays out like one of those Canadian Moments that used to run on CBC—now with added bodice-ripping. Fae wants to undermine antique gender assumptions, and she goes about it by assembling the weakest clichés she can find.