The Lighthouse (2019) Director: Robert Eggers
“Hark Triton, hark! Bellow, bid our father the Sea King rise from the depths full foul in his fury!”
★★★☆☆
Following up on his acclaimed horror flick The Witch (2015), Robert Eggers returned in 2019 with a script written by his brother, Max Eggers. The Lighthouse is an unsettling tale of nautical madness and distorted mythology as two men are left stranded on an island together during a howling storm and they gradually go insane inside a lighthouse. The first man is named Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe), a grizzled and smarmy seadog who rules the island like a tyrant; and the other is a young novice named Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson), though we later learn Ephraim Winslow is merely an assumed from his former boss who died in a logging accident that could have been prevented –his real name is Thomas Howard. Wake treats Winslow poorly, giving him all the dirty, grimy jobs on the island. He also forbids Winslow from entering the upper chamber of the lighthouse, and one night Wake witnesses a naked Winslow standing before the light atop the lighthouse. As time passes, and a storm approaches, their supplies begin to dwindle and they drink up all their alcohol while slowly going insane amidst hallucinations of mermaids and other mythological creatures until Winslow eventually beats Wake to a bloody pulp and buries him alive. He then takes the lighthouse keys and enters the upper chamber of the lighthouse only to be driven mad in a fit of laughter. Winslow then falls down the stairs and in the final scene of the film we see a naked Winslow slowly dying on the beach while seagulls peck out his innards. Was this all real? Or merely the fever dream of a dying man? The film provides no answers, and deliberately so.
The Lighthouse is an unsettling and shockingly disgusting film, but its style is absolutely impressive –the film is gorgeously shot by cinematographer Jarin Blaschke in black and white (for which it won an Oscar), and the use of lighting and shadow paints a haunting and crisp backdrop. Admittedly, I appreciated the technical and cinematic achievements of The Lighthouse far more than the plot or the themes in this film. I found the oddly crude sexual overtures to be off-putting as the whole film is rife with a strange erotic subtext. Perhaps I need to sit on this film for a while and re-watch it in coming years but I really don’t relish doing so.
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The realms of insanity are probably the most methodically creative in our cinematic art. Thanks for your review.