The Lighthouse

In the late 1800s, Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) takes a contract job as an assistant lighthouse keeper on a remote island off the New England coast. The head lighthouse keeper, Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe), is a demanding, unhygienic, boastful drunk. Winslow is also tormented by a one-eyed gull who seems to mock him at every turn. After learning about each other’s pasts, Winslow and Wake begin to get along better. However, the menace of a storm threatens to destroy their rations, their truce, and, ultimately, their sanity.

Directed by Robert Eggers (The Witch) and written by his brother Max, The Lighthouse is an exacting film that commands respect though not necessarily admiration. Ostensibly inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s last story (“The Light House”), the film also takes cues from Melville and Coleridge, Greek mythology, the historic Smalls Lighthouse Tragedy, and, at least tonally, Lovecraft. It’s awash in symbolism that is refracted through Winslow’s dreams and hallucinations, some of which are revelatory (i.e. a vision of Wake’s one-eyed previous assistant - reincarnated in the gull, perhaps?) and some of which are just unsettling (giant octopus tentacles and mermaid sex). For every meaningful detail imparted, however strange or disturbing, The Lighthouse seems content to also offer us random shrieks and shouts and nonsense.

Questionable editing aside, The Lighthouse is aesthetically striking, and its two leads fully embrace their challenging roles. Eggers shot in black and white on 35-mm film to give the movie a vintage look, and Mark Korven’s score makes good use of appropriately ominous droning. As Wake, Dafoe sounds like the Sea Captain from The Simpsons with a puffed-up lexicon. He’s a grotesque and pathetic figure, equal parts controlling (he refuses to let Winslow anywhere near the lantern room) and desperate for approval. Speaking of desperation, a lean, Maine-accented Pattinson gives Winslow a past-haunted, repressed-violent quality that is evident even before his sanity starts to fray. It isn’t to Jack Nicholson in The Shining levels of crazy-gone-crazier, but it does lend tension to the abuse and misfortune that he endures in a subservient role in the film’s early going.

Thematically and symbolically rich and skillfully crafted, The Lighthouse is nearly undone by its excesses, but it’s still worth watching even if the experience makes you never want to watch it again.