The Lighthouse

It feels like an Edgar Allen Poe tale, and Robert and Max Eggers had originally intended such with 2019's THE LIGHTHOUSE.  I also thought of David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, and Werner Herzog.  But truly this is a film like no other I've seen.  The former Eggers has gone to much trouble to evoke a long gone era, using a 1.19:1 aspect ratio that will frustrate fans of widescreen, but delight those who favor the orthochromatic aesthetic of the 1800s.  I knew from that first still I saw online about a year ago that I would be taking this journey.

You might say the film is, in the modern vernacular, bat shit crazy.  But there is no sustained intensity, rather a slow burn madness with inevitable flare ups.  Some events are predictable, many are not.  In a story of two men long isolated on island that is battered by oppressive weather and a dwindling supply of alcohol, it is unsurprising that the Eggers brothers include master and servant power plays and homo-eroticism.  Winslow (Robert Pattinson) arrives on the rock to work as a lighthouse keeper for a month's stint.  His boss is a salty cuss called Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe), who's clearly been at the job for too long.  He won't even let the kid up the stairs to the big lens, rather keeping him below to clean the cistern and mop a floor repeatedly, never to his satisfaction.  Wake is like a nagging wife, in a way.

He's a lot of other things, too.  But so is Winslow, and while the elements pound and things get stranger each day, identities will blur.  A mermaid will appear, perhaps only in the young man's head.  Sea gulls will hover.  Of particular interest is the one with a single eye.  It's bad luck to kill a gull, Wake warns in between his rambling, barely intelligible Irish brogued speeches and displays of flatulence.

This is a difficult review to write.  Surely a scholarly essay is to come out of THE LIGHTHOUSE, a film as mad and literary as anything made these days.  Director Robert Eggers follows up THE WITCH with an entirely dissonant and fascinating drama.  Quite funny in moments.  You might also deem it a horror film.   His meticulous technical approach does make the film seem as if it were shot in 1890, with the benefit of Panavision and HMI lighting.  Eggers is highly concerned with period authenticity, especially in speech.  Both actors get their lengthy dirges, and are often amazing.  Highly committed.  One would have to be to make such a film work.

And it does, beautifully.  Enough cannot be said about Jarin Blaschke's photography.  Mark Korven's loud, frightening score is perfection.  Eggers makes this unusual contemporary film play like an old wickie's turpentine fueled poem.   He frames and paces it to always make us anxious and puzzled.  It evokes likeness of other artists, some already mentioned, but this is a one-of-a-kind motion picture, clearly not for all tastes.