The Lighthouse

THE LIGHTHOUSE

A few years ago, filmmaker Robert Eggers exploded onto the scene with his debut film The VVitch, a nightmarish, uncompromising, bleak tale of a Puritan family excommunicated from their colony. Forced to fend for themselves and far away from resources, things start to go south for the family as their infant child disappears as the result of an alleged witch living in the nearby forest. Tensions rise as more malignant – possibly imagined - supernatural forces begin to torment the family, exacerbating their religious paranoia and growing mistrust of one another. It was meditative, genuinely chilling, and established Eggers as one of the most unique new voices in horror to be reckoned with. This just made us all the more excited for his follow-up effort, The Lighthouse. And now that it’s here, it was worth the wait.

Set in the late 19^th century, two men named Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) and Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) are tasked with taking care of a lighthouse on a remote island far from civilization. Ephraim is a young former timberman of otherwise mysterious origin while Wake serves as his cantankerous supervisor who proves to be a good drinking buddy at dinnertime, but also has some odd fascination with the light of the lighthouse. But after spending multiple weeks on the island, the two men start to lose their grip on reality, and slowly but surely succumb to the further effects of isolation.

This time around, Eggers seems to reach into a similar bag of tricks that he used on The VVitch – i.e. slow, deliberate sequences that lure you into an uncomfortable atmosphere, period-accurate dialogue, a discordant musical score, etc. – but he brings in a new element that could potentially catch a viewer off-guard: humor. Yes, despite this film’s terrifying atmosphere, there are a surprising amount of funny moments, most of them coming from Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson’s moonlit drunken revelries.

However, don’t let that fool you into thinking The Lighthouse is by any means an easy ride. It is one rollercoaster of a film, wildly rocking you back and forth between a litany of different moods and emotions. And what really helps is that the first act of the film is pretty slow, luring us as the audience into a sense of mundanity as we are shown in detail the grueling processes by which Wake and Winslow care for the lighthouse. But once the film hits the ground running, we are jerked out of our complacency and launched into a world where anything can happen, from ghostly visions of sea creatures to gallows humor about farts.

And through it all, we have powerhouse performances from our two leads carrying us. Robert Pattinson shows his chops as the mysterious Winslow, demonstrating that despite how much flak he was given for Twilight, he really is one of the best young actors working today, serving his purpose as the audience surrogate while also cutting loose when stuff starts to hit the fan. Willem Dafoe seems to have beamed down from another planet as Thomas Wake, putting on a sailor’s accent that would make Mr. Krabs overwhelmingly proud. His unpredictable, mercurial demeanor serves as a very good offset to Pattinson’s relatively down-to-Earth Winslow, and the two of them carry out the two-man show with aplomb. The cinematography by Jarin Blaschke is appropriately claustrophobic, making use of a 1.19:1 aspect ratio and black-and-white film stock that invokes nostalgia for the likes of F.W. Murnau and Ingmar Bergman. On the musical side of things, Mark Korven returns to give the mood an extra kick of discomfort with a multitude of different kinds of atmospheric textures, resulting in one of my favorite musical scores of the year.

And as the film came to its showstopping finale, all I was thinking to myself was how much emotion this elicited out of me, even more so than many of the other films that I have seen in the past few years. And I cannot wait to see what Eggers has next up his sleeve.

So, what are you reading this review for? Get out, go see it! It’s an exciting thrill ride that will go down in history as a both a great Halloween fixture and a great horror film!  

Thanks for reading and I will see you all real soon!