The allure of the light drives two men into pitch-black madness in Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse, a work of period-piece insanity that more than fulfills the promise of his 2015 debut The Witch. On a New England rock enshrouded in crashing-wave mist and bombarded with torrential rain, 19th-century lighthouse keepers Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) and Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) tend to their duties, with the former manning the illuminated tower and the latter maintaining their domicile and coal-burning furnace. Their laborious toil is compounded first by interpersonal tensions over Wake’s possessiveness regarding the lighthouse itself, and then by run-ins with squawking gulls (vessels for dead sailors’ spirits, says Wake) and visions of slimy tentacles and inviting mermaids. Shot in luminously grainy 4:3 black-and-white that gives the action the look of a weathered old photograph, scored to unholy bellowing and siren shrieks, and driven by ornate storybook dialogue fit for a nautical nightmare, it’s a film about guilt, shame and greed (and the psychosis it begets) that exudes cramped, soggy malevolence. Dafoe’s curse to the maritime gods is an all-timer, and a superb Pattinson matches his sloshed, wild-eyed lunacy step for floorboard-creaking step. Eggers eventually drowns his material in slithering sexualized imagery of a crazed sort, and caps things off in a manner that’s all the more cautionary-tale haunting for remaining so unforgettably oblique.
The allure of the light drives two men into pitch-black madness in Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse, a work of period-piece insanity that more than fulfills the promise of his 2015 debut The Witch. On a New England rock enshrouded in crashing-wave mist and bombarded with torrential rain, 19th-century lighthouse keepers Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) and Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) tend to their duties, with the former manning the illuminated tower and the latter maintaining their domicile and coal-burning furnace. Their laborious toil is compounded first by interpersonal tensions over Wake’s possessiveness regarding the lighthouse itself, and then by run-ins with squawking gulls (vessels for dead sailors’ spirits, says Wake) and visions of slimy tentacles and inviting mermaids. Shot in luminously grainy 4:3 black-and-white that gives the action the look of a weathered old photograph, scored to unholy bellowing and siren shrieks, and driven by ornate storybook dialogue fit for a nautical nightmare, it’s a film about guilt, shame and greed (and the psychosis it begets) that exudes cramped, soggy malevolence. Dafoe’s curse to the maritime gods is an all-timer, and a superb Pattinson matches his sloshed, wild-eyed lunacy step for floorboard-creaking step. Eggers eventually drowns his material in slithering sexualized imagery of a crazed sort, and caps things off in a manner that’s all the more cautionary-tale haunting for remaining so unforgettably oblique.
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