Getting struck by lightning is, famously, pretty rare. In the new fictional short film “Don vs Lightning,” by Johnny Burns and Pier van Tijn, a standoffish fisherman in the Scottish Highlands contends with a strange pattern: getting zapped over and over again.
Don, played by Peter Mullan—whose ream of a résumé includes “War Horse,” “Westworld,” “My Name is Joe,” and Amazon’s forthcoming “Lord of the Rings” TV series—trudges down an empty road, carrying a tackle box and a fishing pole. As a red Volkswagen crests the hill behind him, he looks suspiciously up at the sky, where clouds are gathering. The driver is his talkative neighbor Maggie, played by Joanna Scanlan, who stops her car and puts down the window for a chat. She asks if Don would like a lift into town. He would not. A moment after Maggie drives away, a lightning bolt strikes Don, who falls to his knees and keels over.
This is not the cantankerous fisherman’s first encounter with lightning. “The whole town’s worried, though I told them not to be,” Maggie says afterward, at the hospital. “ ‘Don’t worry about Donald Campbell,’ I said. ‘This is just his thing.’ ”
The film is based on the true story of Roy Sullivan, a Shenandoah National Park ranger who survived seven lightning strikes. Sullivan took to carrying a can of water around on stormy days in case he had to put his hair out, according to Burns, who wrote and directed the film with van Tijn. “He just kept getting fed up because his friends would just avoid him,” Burns said. “No one really knew what was going on, and it never seemed to really hurt him that badly. But it was just this massive inconvenience.”
Don, whose affliction fascinates his neighbors, finds the village’s attention suffocating. In a hardware store where he’s gone to get fishing supplies, a concerned shopper corners him to ask if there is anything he needs. “Hooks,” he says. After he gets struck again, just outside the door, Don walks back into the shop, grabs a bottle off the counter, douses his singed shoulder, and crashes sideways onto the ground.
On set, Mullan did the majority of the falls himself. “We had a stunt person. And Peter was, like, ‘No, it’s all right,’ ” the producer Sonya Sier said. “He was just, like, throwing himself about.” “Which was great,” Burns added, “until we needed smoke coming out from where he’d been struck,” and the actor got burned by a match stuck to the back of his sweater. “He was, like, ‘Maybe you guys could do that in post.’ ”
As the lightning strikes add up, Don’s prickly exterior begins to wear down. It would be hard not to take the strikes as a personal attack from on high, but the big grump seems unsurprised that nature, or a divine power, may have taken issue with his existence. Almost two years into an ongoing pandemic, his weary acceptance of the uncontrollable feels familiar. “I think that underlying sense of the universe being out to get you, and there not being anything you can do about it,” van Tijn said, “feels like a pretty pertinent message right now.”
