
Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse is a wet and frightening bromantic horror film unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Chekhovian in its treatment of small spaces yet Kafkaesque through its sequence of events, I was equally delighted and horrified but never once bored or disenchanted.
The leads are strong. Robert Pattinson is the dainty Ephraim Winslow, second wickie to the begrudged, bamboozled Thomas Wake played by Willem Dafoe. They’re opposites in all the ways young and old men can be, and when they’re stuck swabbing decks and sharing sea stories together, it’s a treat to see these two actors rip from each other’s differences.
Wake is the superstitious one. “Bad luck to leave a toast unchecked” he warns Winslow on their first night together. Wake cautions Winslow not to spar with the seagulls, enter the top of the lighthouse, or spend a night without drink. “Man must have a good reason for not drinking,” he says. Winslow thinks he knows better. Drinking makes sailors stupid, he assumes, and a straight mind is the best mind for working hard.
But the work is terrible. Sludgy shit cakes the decks and contaminates the drinking water. The planks must be so damp that every time Winslow sops it with a sponge he rots its core. The foghorn blows Winslow awake as the wind smacks his face. The elements surrounding these men, much like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, are a malevolent force of their own; a ghostly foe twiddling fates like toys.
Much of the film is watching these two men undergo their miserable routines on this remote island far removed from civilization. Nobody wants their job. But rather than dabble in misery and sorrow, Eggers squeezes humor out of every bit of horror, and injects horror into things that are superficially funny.
For instance, Winslow spends a majority of his bedtime masturbating to the carved wooden figure of a sea mermaid. How else does a man maintain his sanity? When his fantasies begin to bleed into his reality, this motif evolves from funny to creepy, and by the end even I didn’t quite know how to feel. Eggers’s ability to oscillate between humor and horror is impressive, masterful even, considering this is his sophomore feature.
Like The Witch, The Lighthouse presents a world that has been meticulously researched and elegantly restored — if not heightened. Eggers and his team are history buffs, because the language of Winslow and Wake seeps with period detail. It’s a delight to witness and decipher, in the same way that The Witch utilized Middle English to bring us into the world.
There are no weaknesses in The Lighthouse. Only uncertainties. Everything that Eggers establishes is explored with macabre pomp and decadence. Sometimes, however, I often wondered if this decadence served a purpose other than to be bold and eccentric. I was reminded of A24’s other wacky island film Swiss Army Man; a brilliant film, but also a confounding one.
It’s a trope for art movies to pump lavish set pieces and nonlinear editing into their innards simply for the sake of being weird. I wouldn’t directly lump The Lighthouse into that “try-hard” category, but I wished by the film’s end that things tied up more purposefully as they did in The Witch.
Or at least, didn’t repeat the same odd beat over and over again. There’s only so many times I can see these two men drink, dream, and beat the piss out of each other only to fall asleep, wake up, and do it again.