The Lighthouse (2019)
dir. Robert Eggers
Rated: R
image: ©2019 A24
It started with a Fresnel lens. If you’re wondering what that is, then we have something in common; so did I when I first read the term. For his second feature effort, The Lighthouse, director Robert Eggers knew he wanted the 19th century technology – developed specifically to make lighthouses visible by ships from farther away than was previously possible – as the centerpiece of his film. Just like with his directorial debut, the hypnotic 2015 film The Witch, Eggers was obsessed, and achieved, the most meticulous period accuracy for The Lighthouse. It seems blasphemous to use the word masterpiece so early in his career, but with his painstaking attention to detail, his eye for striking cinematic imagery, and his exploration of the human psyche, that’s just what Eggers has produced with both The Witch and now with The Lighthouse.
Set in the late 1890s and making use of sources like Herman Melville’s writings and actual lighthouse-keepers’ journals for its idiosyncratic dialog, Eggers hasn’t just re-created the time period with The Lighthouse. He’s brought it back from the dead. This movie lives and breathes with a sense of authenticity that’s hard to overstate. It starts with the framing. Filmed in the archaic square aspect ratio of 1.19:1, Eggers and his cinematographer, Jarin Blaschke, use a timeless window to show us the world they’re conjuring. Blaschke’s rapturous monochromatic photography furthers the effort of transporting us back in time. The inky blacks and stark whites pay tribute to the chiaroscuro lighting of the German Expressionist films of the 1920s.
And just like that earlier film movement, Eggers’s story is filled with existential fear and dread. The setting for this chamber piece is a remote New England island with a lone lighthouse standing as the only sign of humanity. Two lighthouse keepers – or “wickies” in the parlance of the time – arrive for their month-long stent tending the maritime navigational tool. Veteran wickie and hardass – to use our current parlance – Thomas Wake sets about breaking in his new assistant, Ephraim Winslow. As the two men with rough edges begin to rub up against one another, they don’t smooth each other out, but instead begin to grind each other down.
At the center of this two-hander are Willem Dafoe as Wake and Robert Pattinson as Winslow. They are, in fact, just about the only faces we see during the picture’s two-hour running time. Only one other name appears in the cast. Valeriia Karaman plays The Mermaid, who appears to Winslow as he slowly looses his grip on sanity.
The Lighthouse could easily be translated to the stage, which makes sense considering Eggers’ roots in theatre as a designer and director. Both Dafoe and Pattinson become lost in their characters, cloaking their words in thick period accents. Just like with The Witch – a film I screened at home, which allowed me to turn on subtitles in order to more easily understand what was being said – those thick accents and antiquated dialog make things, at times, a little hard to follow, but the sense of authenticity more than makes up for it.
Pattinson is good as Winslow, a man shifting from job to job searching for something he excels at, but Dafoe is on glorious fire as the crusty old bastard Wake. His character’s relentless needling of Winslow, from critiques on his job performance to his insistence that a real man doesn’t abstain from alcohol, sets up a confrontational dynamic that spirals out of control as the film unspools. Dafoe chews scenery as only he can, but it never feels out of place here. It works in perfect harmony with the aesthetic Eggers has crafted.
The director, who cowrote The Lighthouse with his brother, Max Eggers, is preoccupied with psychological horror here, as he was in The Witch. What’s different is his focus on the fragility of the human psyche. As Wake and Winslow’s relationship starts to fall apart, they become closer and strangely more intimate in other ways. Late in the film, near the violent and downright bonkers climax, the two men begin to confuse their identities. It’s a turn that I have to assume was inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s seminal rumination on Jungian psychology, Persona; a film I discovered in college and which blew my tender little mind.
Along with all the fascinating mind games, The Lighthouse also incorporates a unique brand of droll humor. Most of it involves Wake’s persistent flatulence, but Eggers also uses sound design in other ways for comedic effect. At one point, a colony of seagulls seems to laugh at Winslow when he attempts to empty bedpans into the wind and ends up with a face full of piss, à la The Dude and cremated human remains in The Big Lebowski.
The sound design (comedic and otherwise) deserves special praise. Eggers and his sound design team make the soundscape of the film particularly immersive and intense. Whether it’s the jarring bass of a foghorn – another must-have element that set Eggers on his course with this project – or the persistence of waves crashing on the rocks of the island, the soundtrack makes the world on screen inescapable.
Eggers also knows how to create stunning cinematic images. One of the first shots of the movie, in which Wake and Winslow look directly into the camera as they arrive on the island, is like an oil painting come to life. He uses the art of tableau in two instances in particular to make motion picture works of art. Late in the film, Eggers freezes the action (not a literal freeze, mind you, but an elongated shot where the two main characters are simply standing still in another painting-like pose) as Wake attacks Winslow. It even comes with lighthouse-like beams of illumination shining out from Wake’s eye sockets. The last shot of the movie is similar. I won’t spoil it here, but it is a haunting, horrific image that stuck with me long after I witnessed it.
And that is the magic of the cinema of Robert Eggers (although it is admittedly a small sample size to date). He creates images, sounds, and scenarios that haunt you, that roll around in your head, long after you experience them. He is a film artist, and The Lighthouse is a singular work of art. It’s one of the most exciting, profound, funny, and captivating films of the year.
Why it got 4.5 stars:
- I can’t tell you how satisfying Robert Eggers’s aesthetic is to me. Both of the worlds he’s created so far on screen have been mesmerizing, intellectually challenging, and exciting to behold. I can’t wait to see what he does next.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- My favorite word (and probably the least critic-y one I could use) when describing a movie comes into play for just the third time in the five years I’ve been writing reviews. The Lighthouse is bonkers. It joins Mad Max: Fury Road and Sorry to Bother You in how far out there it goes.
- There are wonderful The Shining-like music cues from composer Mark Korven, especially during the mermaid dream sequence.
- Speaking of mythical sea creatures, forget The Little Mermaid. Robert Eggers takes the idea of mermaids back to their elemental state, and they are as terrifying as they are mysterious.
- I read a review that called the scene where Robert Pattinson’s character violently murders a sea gull hilarious. I had no idea how I was supposed to react to it. I desperately want to see it again now, knowing some people found humor in it.
- Dafoe gives a rip-roaring diatribe of a speech late in the movie (OK, he actually gives a few of these throughout the movie), and the extreme contrast lighting on his face during this speech is glorious.
- Besides the word bonkers, I can’t think of any better way to describe what I went through while watching The Lighthouse than what I wrote in one of the last notes I took during the screening: “This movie is giving me the freak-out!”
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- This was a critics only screening, and there was laughter throughout, but I never got a good sense of how everyone felt after. Film critics play their emotions about a movie close to the vest…