Robert Eggers completes the triumvirate of modern horror auteurs, which includes Jordan Peele and Ari Aster, with his second major feature film after The Witch. Whereas his first consisted of a family isolated in 17th-century woods haunted by the occult, his second consists of two loners on a 19th-century island tormented by nature (external or internal, but we'll get to that). Where his first thematically moved to transcendence, his second leads to doom. The former relies on womanhood, the latter on masculinity. In many ways, I'd argue these are companion films. But let's try to consider The Lighthouse on its own treacherous ground.
Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson), a young ex-lumberjack looking for better pay, is dumped on a storm-swept, rocky island somewhere off New England. The more remote the lighthouse, the better the pay, and Winslow is ready to earn his keep as the new "wickie," or lighthouse keeper. Until, that is, he meets the crusty old sea-dog senior keeper Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe), who barks his orders with a thick dialect and jealousy keeps the ethereal light to himself. So begins a battle of wits, a test of sanity, and a duel to the death at the utter brink of the world.
Shot in a boxy, tight aspect ratio (don't ask me what numbers) and on black-and-white 35mm film, Eggers clearly had a lot of unusual intentionality for this film. And while the delivery of his vision could be as inaccessible and even off-putting as Wake's archaic language, that is probably part of the point. More accurately a film in grayscale than B&W, the whole thing looks pallid and cold. It thrums along with a grandiose, deliberate visual pace not unlike a German Expressionist film, underscored brilliantly with Mark Korven's (The Witch, In the Tall Grass, The Terror: Infamy) doomsday dirge and a haunting foghorn bellow. The tight screen shape makes for a claustrophobic viewing experience, even as it distances us from the reality of the proceedings.
Paradoxically, even while the film holds us at a cold arm's length, it invites us into the minds of its two leading men. Each deliver stunning performances, and each suggests enough madness to keep us alert for cinematic tomfoolery. Though the film begins with a promise of Winslow's four-week trial period, we quickly lose all sense of time and begin to suspect the island does not exist in temporal reality. As their dark secrets are revealed -- the men, we learn, share a first name and wicked past sins -- the men appear to act as foils and doubles for each other. Their alcoholism doesn't help their potential madness, and the film's editing teeters toward incomprehensibility: are the impossible things we see "real", or products of the deranged minds unraveling before us?
The madness of their experience, it should be noted, is also very possibly real. It's not impossible that their madness is provoked by the island's apparently supernatural activity. A half-blind seagull (think of The Raven and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) torments them and could represent anything from Poe's Black Cat to Norse mythology's Odin. A siren and/or mermaid appears at least twice to tempt and terrify. Mysterious tentacles appear at key points and could indicate liaisons with a giant squid, Poseidon's (or Ursula's) devilish presence, or even a Lovecraftian Elder Thing. Further, it's up for debate whether these, as Macbeth would say, supernatural solicitings are only visible to Winslow or to both men. If Wake (whose name suggests a disturbance) can see these things, is he also going mad; if not, could he be an extension of the horrors, or even the cause?
Then again, Wake has a tendency to spin his own tales between bouts of farting. The air incessantly leaving his body seems to make his rather gaseous existence something out of myth. And this brings me to my final thoughts: that the enigmatic light in the lighthouse reveals the film to be essentially about nothing. Sure, we can tie everything to this story from Melville to Jewett, Milton to Woolf, Shakespeare to Dr. Caligari. But the men, vying for proximity to the light -- the light! A beacon for wayward souls that saves no one, serving instead as a tool for obsession and madness and a lure for monsters of the sea -- ultimately meet doom and death after getting too close. This movie is a tall tale, an urban legend, and perhaps anyone looking for anything more concrete will only crash on the rocks.
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