Robert Eggers arrived onto the
scene in 2016 with The Witch, a tense, atmospheric period piece where a
puritanical family on the edges of civilization tears itself apart after being
cursed by a witch, but half the time you’re left wondering if their paranoia is
their own doing or that of outside forces. The Lighthouse operates on
the same principle, only the supernatural forces at play are more vague, and
considering our two characters are already so far gone and on such different
ends of the spectrum that they wouldn’t need outside aid to go mad.
Our story is set in the 1890’s
and follows two lighthouse keepers: Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe), a superstitious veteran
wicky who’s rough as a bed of barnacles and salty as the sea herself, and
Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson), a reserved former lumberjack looking to
turn a new leaf. The two are left on a rock together for a month of back
breaking labor, manning a lighthouse far off the coast of Maine. Ephraim does most
of the day labor, feeding the furnace, filling up the oil pit and cleaning the cabin,
while Thomas barks demeaning orders and hogs the nightly duty of keeping the
lantern lit. It doesn’t take long for them to get sick of each other’s company,
but when the boat that’s supposed to take them home doesn’t arrive, the
isolation takes its toll and threatens their already fragile sanity.
By design, The Lighthouse
feels like an old forgotten horror film from the 1940’s that never saw the
light of day until it was rediscovered in a basement somewhere. Shot in
stunning black and white with antique equipment and framed by a claustrophobic
1.19:1 aspect ratio, with dialogue that wouldn’t be out of place in the works
of Melville, Hemmingway or Lovecraft, while also letting the actor’s faces do
most of the talking, there’s a certain antiquity to this film’s presentation.
And for all the sea shanty vernacular that spills from these character’s mouths
like fish from a net, it also knows when to let the silence do all the work. It’s
a good ten minutes before either of them speaks (we hear Willem Dafoe’s fart
before we hear his voice), and it’s at least 45 minutes before either learn
each other’s names.
That tight, square aspect
ratio makes the audience feel like it’s watching their descent into madness
through a peephole or the cracks of a fence, squeezing us in to the already
close quarters with them. The lighthouse is just as much of a character as
Thomas or Ephraim; a large, looming beacon that creeks and moans whenever
someone so much as pumps the water spout, blurts out its whale song of a
foghorn throughout the night, and whose piercing bright light holds some
hypnotic quality that affects everything in its radiant glow. Eggers’s past career
as a set designer is evident here. Although the cabin and the lighthouse were
both built from the ground up specifically for this movie, it looks like
something that has stood vigil on the craggy shores for 150 years.
It’s a two-man show with Dafoe
and Pattinson giving two of the most unforgettable performances of the year,
and possibly their entire careers. They drag each other into the cold, dark,
briny depths of madness, with each experiencing their own unique flavor of
insanity. Dafoe’s character is an archetypal salty sea captain that’s so over
the top that he might as well be a cartoon character. He’s a harsh, tyrannical
slave driver when sober, and a jaggedly elegant wordsmith when drunk (which is
basically every night). Pattinson, meanwhile, is quietly seething with resentment,
slowly broken by his flatulent overseer’s abuse and the grueling labor he puts
him through. Aside from shoveling coal and oil day in day out, mending the
perpetually leaky ceiling and floorboards and getting piss blown back in his
face when he empties the chamber pot, he’s haunted by visions of a mermaid that
he violently relieves himself to, and taunted by a stubborn seagull that mocks
him at every turn.
But the thing that threw me
off guard, and what made this movie so palatable, is how surprisingly funny it
is. Where The Witch was a burning crucible of religious paranoia, The
Lighthouse is no less intense, but is just as much a tale of two terrible
roommates as it is Lovecraftian horror, and always breaks up the tension in the
most unexpected moments. Those interactions between Ephraim and the seagull,
while eventually reaching a grizzly end and later ramifications that recall Poe’s
raven or Coleridge’s albatross, is also comparable to Bill Murray’s battle with
the gopher in Caddyshack. When they run out of food and are forced to
sustain themselves on booze, they switch between fisticuffs, singing and
dancing, hurling insults, and tender moments that nearly turn homoerotic
subtext into text. By this time, all sense of time, reason and sanity has
completely slipped away, until they’re left playing the world’s most demented
game of house. Like Eggers said in a Hollywood Reporter interview, “Nothing good
can come when two men are trapped alone in a giant phallus.”
Bottom line, The Lighthouse
is an eerie, funny, fascinating, mesmerizing little gem that works equally well
as an artistic mood piece and a pitch-black comedy. It’s a strikingly unique
psychological exorcism of the mania of isolation, loneliness and repression
that recalls the literary and cinematic classics but fashions them into a weather-beaten
patchwork that could withstand the most violent of hurricanes. Robert Eggers’s
next project will be about Vikings, and rumor has it that he’s in line to work
on a remake of Nosferatu. After seeing this, I couldn’t think of a
better person for the job.
10/10
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