From the glowing reception enjoyed by 2015’s The Witch, you’d think Robert Eggers was an industry old-head. In reality, it was the New Hampshire director’s feature-length debut. With it, Eggers established a style of film-making indebted to many, but entirely his own; one fastidious and detail-oriented, visually sparse and striking, and saturated with singsong period dialects. Eggers himself has expressed disdain for the genre trappings of The Witch, and is on record as saying it only got made because his “weirder” treatments had all been rejected.
The Lighthouse finds Eggers, along with a laundry list of returning collaborators, unleashing that weirdness. This time, Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography is more experimental, Mark Korven’s score enmeshes itself in the film’s aggressive sound design, and Linda Muir’s period-authentic costumes are sourced from museum pieces and private collections. Restraints placed on the production of The Witch have dissolved in the wake of its acclaim. The Lighthouse is a production whose budget enabled everyone to take the difficult route—and their passion is plain to see on the screen.
There is little story to speak of—two lighthouse keepers are stranded together in a storm—but the aforementioned elements of the film’s production combine in a poetic whole. Atmospheres succeed one another, rather than acts. Tension is summoned from the image of a churning sea at night (a wonder to behold in 16mm monochrome), the blast of a foghorn, the creak and clatter of a storm which threatens to blow the windows in. The tone of The Lighthouse overwhelms so completely it’s like watching something shot on Mars.
And all this swaddles its centre: two performances (Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson) in a constant fight to out-eccentric each another. The pair scream, burst into hysterics, drunkenly jig, chew cheeks at one another—you name it. What could come across as a hyper-condensed drama-school showreel is grounded in mysterious, sometimes contradictory character motivations which further contribute to the film’s disorienting effect. Like Eraserhead before it (surely a sonic and visual influence), The Lighthouse balances between hilarity and horror—but where Lynch pointed to the existence of this contrast in the real world, Eggers uses it to hurtle us further into space. There is almost nothing familiar in The Lighthouse—and what greater praise can a work of art receive?
The Lighthouse is out now.
Words by Andrew O’Keefe