The Lighthouse (2019)

Director: Robert Eggers

Screenplay: Robert and Max Eggers

Cast: Robert Pattinson as Thomas Howard; Willem Dafoe as Thomas Wake; Valeriia Karaman as the Mermaid

If cinema was dead, how does The Lighthouse exist and do as well as it did? Robert Eggers, after the success of The Witch (2015), was in the position of many filmmakers where after success they can crash and burn with projects where the producers allow them carte blanche to make whatever they want. I love such projects, but they rarely success. This could've been such a case, managing to be a monochrome film shot on 35mm celluloid about Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson going insane in a 19th century lighthouse, even shot in a 1.19:1 aspect ratio. What we got instead was a highly admired film that even got a Best Cinematography nomination at the Academy Awards.

Well The Lighthouse exists and upfront I loved the perverse weird thing completely. Dafoe is an old lighthouse keeper, introducing himself with a fart and sounding like the Old Sea Captain parody from The Simpsons, whilst Robert Pattinson is a new employee on an island. The Lighthouse from here is surprisingly simple in what it's about, namely that it makes a damn good argument about the dangers of getting shitfaced on alcohol continually. I'd argue there are explicit supernatural aspects, as I'll get to the seagull, whilst there is also the subplot that Dafoe is obsessed with keeping Patterson out of the top of the lighthouse^*. Aside from this, this is a film about two men going insane. This is not helped by the fact the drinking water isn't great, being in the 19th century, and booze is found on the island with considerable ease.

Eggers' style here is distinct. Shot in black and white, to the point the cinematographer Jarin Blaschke was working with a camera lens as old as from 1912¹ and had to figure out how to adapt it to modern cameras, this film looks truly unique. Adding to this nature, unique in text, is that the screenplay by the Eggers brothers comes from them having done their research and pulling from history for aesthetic, to the point of the lighthouse having been built for the film. This is distinct too as, referencing the supernatural, they pulled from folklore. Shrouded on an island in the middle of the sea, the film runs with nautical aesthetic of the kind where it would make perfect sense for characters to suddenly quote Moby Dick era Herman Melville. This is apt since the script openly admits it took quotation from Melville and Sarah Orne Jewett.

You can practically taste in the air and dirt being blown everywhere, the alien grotesqueness of this world in its use of squid tendrils, crustaceans and other aquatic life on and under the sea. Erotically too as, whilst Patterson's character is also a man hiding a secret, the first moment he starts to crack is when he apparently finds a mermaid (Valeriia Karaman). Thanks to the screenwriters' research on shark vaginas, you get a film here like Peter Strickland's In Fabric (2018) which manages to get away with stuff in a fifteen rated film in the United Kingdom which is gleefully transgressive.

The little supernatural details do suggest a bit more is going on in the island. There is a one eyed seagull, (played by three in a dying breed of trained birds from Britain who, alongside their trainer, should've gotten a Best Supporting Acting Oscar nomination², a bird onscreen that is visibly antagonistic in their small role to Patterson in an unnaturally intelligent way. Dafoe wants him never to kill seagulls, as they are said to be the souls of the sailors who died at sea, which comes into play. The secret of what is in the top of the lighthouse is never ever seen by us; suffice to say that in how its shot, it cannot be something like a hallucination but nudges into cosmic horror, the area of H.P. Lovecraft or even a William Hope Hodgson in that there are things which are beyond the senses of human beings at the sea. There's even a religious strain as especially in one shot, a reference to Prometheus, the man who acquired fire for human kind of note due to how unfortunate his reward for that was from the ancient Greek gods.

Beyond this, the mood and style offers a dramatic weight for what is very clearly told in terms of story, especially as it swings upon the guilt that Patterson character is trying to suppress but failing to. Helping considerably is that the performances are excellent; Dafoe is a veteran who has always been reliable, whilst Robert Pattinson becoming as good as his senior. Patterson is in a fascinating position that, starting the 2010s in the last of the Twilight films where he really wasn't good, only to become a distinct and great actor, he is in the position of a figure like James Dean where his handsomeness has made him an idol but he himself wishes to become a great actor, which he has strived for and proven himself with. The script itself between him and Dafoe, a two actor film, helped considerably especially as The Lighthouse for all its darkness is rife in exceptional ye old English and is hilarious at times. The film is intentionally funny if you have an incredibly dark sense of humour; the longest monologue, performed by Dafoe that goes into godless intense vengefulness and even evokes the sea god Triton, is played for its over the top nature and language, and only happens because Patterson criticised Dafoe's cooking. Such brevity in the middle of what is a pretty dark film helps so much for it to grow.

Also worth noting is the use of the ratio, where a modern cinema would have to press the buttons to change the shape of the screen to show this film. It's smaller than even the Academy ratio of 1.375:1, one of the earliest in American cinema chosen to organise films to a specific one. It's a testament to how archaic this looks in that the last film I saw in the cinema with a similar square screen image before The Lighthouse was James Whale's The Old Dark House, a film from 1932 which was also a deeply strange and perversely humorous tale. Whilst it could be seen as distancing a viewer, this aspect ratio actually sucked me into this world, a rich one fully felt but the ratio perfect for three actors, a flock of seagulls and no one else onscreen at a single location. The incredible sense of craft on display for such weirdness is something to admire especially as it gets under the skin.

It's pointless to wax admirably about The Lighthouse beyond this, as the film is both a maximalist gem in terms of its craft but very simple to grasp and access, not needing to be scruntiased further. Eggers to his credit avoided both making an over ambitious bomb or trying to make a follow on from his first success, which can plague artists regardless of medium. The result's existence is miraculous and a much needed moment of positivity, showing that bold experimental filmmaking can exist outside the avant-garde. Usually it happens in genre cinema like this a lot, but this belongs to a fascinating series of films, whether each succeed or not, that have been lumped into "elevated horror". That name is problematic, coined by journalists who didn't want to admit praising a horror film, but the idea of horror cinema being a vessel for idiosyncratic oddness and artistic creativity has been with it since Georges Méliès' supernatural films³, making these leanings a rich vein in the genre which has thankfully returned and in the mainstream no less. That its lead to a cartload (boatload) of films over the end of the 2010s which are unpredictable and divisive, from Midsommar (2019) to even Darren Aronofsky's mother! (2017) no matter how I loathed it, is a good sign. And whilst horror cinema from around the world is eclectic, that this moment in the United States exists and makes a contrast to Blumhouse Productions, which disappoints me in every film I see squandering deep concepts for average productions, is only a good thing.

Abstract Spectrum: Absurd/Atmospheric/Bawdy/Grotesque/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

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1) HERE

2) HERE

3) As of 2020, Eggers has been tagged to a reinterpretation of F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), which considering the film has been remade by Werner Herzog means there's no sense of hesitation to this idea, as it the promise that Eggers will likely be researching real vampire lore for his work if it ever was produced and made.

* [MAJOR SPOILER WARNING] Looking into the light up there was probably the worst thing Patterson could do, certainly evoking a Lovecraftian monstrosity especially when you end up seagull food. It does evoke, alongside an explicit depiction of Dafoe (naked) with lights coming out of his eyes, some real supernatural aspects. The contrast with all the stuff likely conjured to Patterson's character as his sanity goes for a walk is well balanced, allowing both sides to exist without a cheap compromise to either taking place [MAJOR SPOILERS END].