Is “The Lighthouse” a searing depiction of madness caused by isolation? A hallucinatory exploration of toxic masculinity? Or, better yet, a metaphor for repressed sexuality that manifests in bursts of abject violence?
Yes, yes and yes.
Robert Eggers, with just his second feature film, following 2015’s wickedly unnerving “The Witch,” has cemented his reputation as a preeminent storyteller willing to mine the darkest crevices of the human soul.
Eggers’ stark, black-and-white “The Lighthouse” is unlike any other movie released this year, and it features two of the best dramatic performances ever filmed. Seriously.
The Lighthouse
4.5 out of 5 stars.
Rated: R
Run Time: 109 minutes
Directed by Robert Eggers
Starring Willem Dafoe, Robert Pattinson, Valeriia Karaman
Opens Friday, October 25
In fact, while I would consider it a crime if Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson aren’t both nominated for an Academy Award, I think the Best Actor race will come down to Dafoe and Joaquin Phoenix in “Joker,” with Pattinson vying for Best Supporting Actor.
Set on a remote New England island in the 1890s, “The Lighthouse” opens with the arrival of Ephraim Winslow (Pattinson), who has received a four-week contract to perform manual labor on the island and repair the lighthouse for its keeper, Thomas Wake (Dafoe).
Winslow is an incredibly reserved, tightly-wound individual who speaks very sparsely. Wake has the more bellicose personality, and he alternates between bellowing orders and insults at Winslow and cajoling him with tales of the sea.
From its outset, with the phallic imagery of the lighthouse lording over the desolate, craggy rock where the two men find themselves held almost captive, Winslow and Wake engage in a verbal sparring match that at times is paternal in nature, with the younger Winslow struggling to appease the elder Wake, as much as it seems sexually charged.
Wake spits snippets of wisdom and lore at his seeming concubine. “Boredom makes men to villains,” he says. “Doldrums is worse than the devil.”
After he spies Winslow scuffling with a particularly curious, one-eyed seagull, Wake cautions his young charge that “it’s bad luck to kill a seabird” because gulls are believed to hold the souls of sailors lost at sea.
There’s a saying in the BDSM community, ‘topping from below,’ which is meant to describe the efforts of a submissive to gain control of a dominant through sheer force of will. As the days begin to bleed into one another, and the two men spend more time in each other’s company, Eggers shows how the weight of Wake’s overbearing presence drives Winslow to act out.
He finds a carved figurine of a mermaid in his mattress, which he fixates on, particularly when he locks himself in the outhouse and furiously masturbates. Then he begins spying on Wake at night as the lighthouse keeper locks himself in the lantern room, seemingly transfixed by the light.
In one taunt sequence, he sneaks up to the lantern room and is shocked to spy Wake cavorting with a tentacled creature, which seems to support what Wake told him early on about the last lighthouse keeper who became enchanted by the light and went mad, killing himself because he believed he was under a sea witch’s spell.
Winslow’s imagination takes a darker turn. In moments of heightened ecstasy and self-pleasure, he sees himself screwing a literal mermaid on the seawall. In a fit of frustration during a long day’s work, he believes he has found a severed head jutting from a pile of rocks.
But, once he finally snaps and kills the persistent gull that refuses to let him be, everything changes. Winslow and Wake get ridiculously drunk on the night before a ship is set to arrive to take Winslow back to the mainland, and he misses the boat. Then the weather turns, as a massive storm whips across the island.
The more they drink, and argue, and share, the closer they become. Wake’s gruff exterior turns more demonstrative. Winslow softens too, sharing a story about a male friendship at a logging camp where he previously worked that slowly twists into a rank admission of a terrible act.
“The Lighthouse” is a master’s thesis in how to use atmosphere, ambient sound and light and shadow to convey a pervasive, disorienting sense of impending doom.
Much like “The Witch,” however, Eggers does not make movies for the masses. He writes dialogue in the cadence and vocabulary of the time in which he is depicting. He doesn’t craft set pieces so much as fix his camera on a moment and allow whatever happens to come forth, almost as if conjuring madness.
There will be plenty of people who take a chance on “The Lighthouse” and absolutely hate it.
I for one was enthralled throughout the film. I was mesmerized both by the staggering genius of Dafoe and Pattinson’s performances as much as their willingness to so thoroughly lose themselves in character.
But the real reason I find myself enchanted by Eggers’ visual sensibilities is his penchant for crafting an indelible final frame, a lasting image that digs into the brain and refuses to let go.
In “The Witch,” it was the sight of Thomasin (Anna Taylor-Joy) literally taking flight after accepting the evil invitation by Black Phillip to embrace dark magic.
With “The Lighthouse,” Eggers delivers another haunting, unsettling and brilliant shot, which I won’t spoil here, other than to say it delivers a jolt that forces you to consider what, if anything, that you’ve witnessed was real.
John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace. Contact him at Blood Violence and Babes.com, on Facebook @BloodViolenceBabes or on Twitter @BVB_reviews.
This article appears in Oct 24-31, 2019.