Review: The Lighthouse (2019)

The Lighthouse is a bizarre, uncategorizable film about madness and isolation. In a sense, it’s a horror film, but only in the sense that David Lynch’s Eraserhead is a horror film. Like that seminal midnight movie, Robert Eggers’ new film defies convention while mining the uncanny space between dreams and real life that can makes cinema so potent to experience. It is boldly conceived, with black-and-white cinematography, a full frame aspect ratio, and a distortion on the lens that replicates the impurities of early film (similar to a film by Canadian auteur Guy Maddin). Its sound design is even more overwhelming that its visual approach. Most notably, Eggers utilizes a foghorn drone that repeats at frequent intervals throughout the entirety of the film. This formal approach destabilizes you as you watch it; it places you onto slippery ground as to the reality of what you’re seeing, not unlike how the young lighthouse keeper at the film’s centre is placed onto slippery rocks while tending the island lighthouse. Like the best blends of arthouse and genre filmmaking, The Lighthouse confounds and dazzles, both through its narrative and its artistry. There are few films like it.

In the most literal sense, The Lighthouse is the story of two lighthouse keepers: Wake (Willem Dafoe) and Winslow (Robert Pattinson). Wake is a veteran keeper who has spent more than a decade working the lighthouse on a remote island in the Atlantic Ocean. Winslow is a first-time wickie (a lighthouse keeper) trying to make money by taking on the difficult work. While the men are supposed to share duties, Wake refuses Winslow entry to the top of the lighthouse, instead ordering him to do the menial tasks of keeping up their residence on the island. He covets the lighthouse like a wife, and as Winslow notices early on during his time on the island, Wake does strange things in the lighthouse at night. Frustrations mount, bizarre dreams start to bleed into reality, and Wake and Winslow are set on a collision course over who gets to control the lighthouse.

The narrative is partially influenced by an incident that took place at Smalls Lighthouse off the coast of Wales in the 18th century, but Eggers only uses this event as a historical foundation to build upon. This account serves a similar purpose to the manuscripts of trials of witchcraft that he used when making The Witch. Like his debut feature, The Lighthouse displays Eggers’ slavish attention to historical detail. For instance, many scenes merely depict Winslow going about the duties of keeping up the small island and we watch him carry out the duties of a junior wickie in the late 19th century: scrub floors, refuel oil canisters, shovel coal into the engine, reshingle the roof, and haul out chamber pots. Dafoe’s Wake speaks in a briny slang with florid declarations straight out of a Herman Melville story. Like in The Witch, Eggers immerses us in the time period in language and visual detail.

But unlike in that film, his dedication to the setting doesn’t preclude a sense of humour. In fact, Eggers seems to have acquired a talent for comedy, as The Lighthouse is uproariously funny at points. Much of this has to do with the two leading actors, who play off each other in marvellous ways and make the film almost a bizarre, sea-soaked version of The Odd Couple. There are frequent scenes of drunken arguments, terse dinner conversations, and vulgar displays of authority, such as Wake’s proclivity to fart in the presence of Winslow. It plays with machismo and power imbalances and labour while also working as a weird roommate comedy. For all the seriousness of the scenario, The Lighthouse understands the human fragility that underpins its characters, and mines this to humorous effect.

Eggers also undercuts any potential self-seriousness with occasional displays of self-deprecating humour, not only self-deprecating of the characters, but of the picture itself. He seems keenly aware that his film is a lot to take in, both aesthetically and narratively, and so frequently subverts the seriousness of his own material in order to relieve tension and play for laughs. There’s no better indication of this than when Winslow erupts in frustration at Wake, dismissing his verbose way of talking as nothing but a tired bit of half-rate Melville. It’s as if Eggers is anticipating some critics’ dismissal of his own work.

Of course, despite all the welcome humour of The Lighthouse, it is still a deeply disturbing and disturbed film. There is more than a whiff of H.P. Lovecraft in the material, not only in the presence of superficial signifiers of cosmic horror—the Atlantic setting, the time period, the presence of tentacles, and unspoken horrors in the water at night—but also through the way that the film explores madness in the most personal terms imaginable. It mines isolation and externalizes Winslow’s mental descent much the same way as a protagonist of a Lovecraft story; it manifests his anxieties and fears and fascination with the unknown in a spectral form. Eggers is also wise to transform the lighthouse itself into an object of cosmic terror. He capitalizes on the otherworldly design of the fresnel lens, with its dozens of layers of glass, and films it in such a way that it becomes a sort of otherworldly or ancient talisman that fuels the madness in a Lovecraft story.

The literary references are not restricted to Lovecraft. The Lighthouse is also clearly influenced by Melville, not only through its direct reference to the great American author of Moby Dick, but through the way it explores the isolation of the sea and the latent homosexuality of seamen that rears its head as aggression and violence. And yet, however much the film draws on these esteemed American authors, the closest point of reference has to be the aforementioned Lynch. In particular, the film’s hallucinogenic finale recalls the terrifying black-and-white horror of “Episode 8” of Twin Peaks: The Return. But in a broader sense, like Lynch, Eggers proves himself a bit of a shapeshifter, able to deftly oscillate in tone between absurdist humour and nightmarish imagery, between art-house slowburn drama and full-on genre provocation. 

If The Witch introduced us to Eggers’ formidable formal talents, The Lighthouse shows that he’s not limited to one manner of expression. His filmmaking is as slippery as the sea, as beautiful, and as unforgiving.

9 out of 10

The Lighthouse (2019, USA)

Directed by Robert Eggers; written by Robert and Max Eggers; starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson.