OnScreen Review: "The Lighthouse"
Ken Jones, Chief Film Critic
Director Robert Eggers made one of the best horror movies of the decade with The Witch in 2016. It was a folktale of horror about the disintegration of the family dynamic in isolation on the edge of the wild frontier in Puritan New England. Of course, a witch is involved too, as well as a goat name Black Phillip being prominently involved. But the family unraveling is at the center of all that film’s proceedings.
One could be forgiven, then, for believing that Eggers has fallen into a formula with his follow-up film, The Lighthouse. To be fair, these films share many similar elements: a film set in a particular place and time with dialogue befitting the time and place; people living in isolation, a strange female lurking on the periphery, an animal prominently featured, and a breakdown, both of the mental nature and of the societal structure. However formulaic this may be, when the formula is this good and the writer/director is so successful in executing it, why mess with a good thing?
Swapped out is the Puritan New England family in the woods and put in their place are two men manning a lighthouse on a remote island for four weeks; wickie Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) and supervisor Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe). Winslow is new to the job but looking for a line of work that he can work hard and make some quicker money and hopefully secure for himself a piece of land and a home for himself. Wake is someone who has made his life on the water, walks with a limp, pissing into his chamber pot and farting without care for whether anyone else is around, and being something of a task master to Winslow with demanding jobs on the rock they are staying.
Almost from the beginning, things seem to be off on this rock in the middle of nowhere. Wake doesn’t allow Winslow into the top level of the lighthouse, where Winslow occasionally observes Wake up there naked in the light. He catches glimpses of other things around the island too; something with tentacles, a one-eyed seagull that will not stop pestering him, and increasingly haunting visions of a mermaid.
Even though much of the film is from the perspective of Pattinson’s Winslow, it is an open question throughout the film whether it is the location, Winslow, Wake, or some combination of all three that is causing things to spiral out of control. To the film’s credit, there is just enough ambiguity and enough hallucination to doubt Winslow as an unreliable narrator that it is open to interpretation. We see Wake take an axe to a lifeboat at one point and then chase Winslow with it; less than two minutes later he claims that it was Winslow who chased him around with the axe. It’s a testament to the crafting of this story that at that point the audience isn’t sure whether they can’t trust what they’ve just witnessed with their own two eyes or the accusations coming out of Dafoe’s mouth.
Almost all of the tension of the film is tied to the ebb and flow of the interpersonal dynamic between Pattinson’s Winslow and Dafoe’s Wake. Initially, there is an uncomfortable barrier between them, made all the worse by Wake being in command. There is no shared responsibility on this island, there is one person telling the other what to do. All the manual labor is on one man’s shoulders (Winslow’s); labors of which there are many. They seem to sleep and work on slightly different schedules, only really overlapping with a shared dinner together. These dinners are initially frosty, particularly because Winslow refuses to share a drink with Wake, but they turn more friendly and mercurial when Wake finally wears Winslow down and they both start drinking. There are more than a few great, jovial moments of the two of them singing old drinking songs and dancing around the table. Of course, the drinking is a double-edged sword, increasing the laughs but also increasing the wild mood swings of the two men.
This film is basically a two-person tour de force. Pattinson and Dafoe are phenomenal actors who have both churned out some terrific performances in the last decade. Pattinson more than holds his own with Dafoe as a screen presence in this film, having standoffs not just with Dafoe but also with that one-eyed seagull. Dafoe, fresh off an Oscar nominated performance last year in At Eternity’s Gate, gives another Oscar-worthy performance, embodying a 19th century seaman in a way that few others could, a grizzled old man full of piss and vinegar (and farts). He can be telling a fond old tale of the sea one minute, and then somberly warning about the superstition of killing a seagull being bad luck. At one point, Pattinson’s Winslow laughs him off and insults his cooking, which launches him into spitting put a damning sea curse, invoking Triton, harpies, and every unimaginable sea horror and invective toward Winslow that lasts for a full two minutes. It’s a tremendous soliloquy.
Also, the film is presented in stark black and white cinematography with a 1.19:1 aspect ratio similar to what was used from 1926-1932 when movies were transitioning to sound. These two production choices give the film a sense of being ethereal and unmoored from time, adding to the hypnotic and psychological horror that unfolds on screen. The ambient sound of the film also adds to the atmosphere of the film, with a monotonous foghorn routinely going off in the background. The score is also haunting. Cinematography, music, and several other production roles are filled by the same people worked on The Witch.
After two films, Robert Eggers has shown himself to be a master of period-specific horror. His films are grounded in the language and appearance of the times they take place. The Lighthouse is a masterful next step as a follow-up to The Witch. Pattinson and Dafoe both give towering, memorable, and haunting performances. This film keeps you off balance all the way through its hallucinatory decent.
Rating: 4 out of 5