The Lighthouse (dir. Robert Eggers, 2019)- Review

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“I just (wanted) to do something weird,” recalled Robert Pattinson of his involvement in The Lighthouse (Screen Daily, 2019). Pattinson’s wish came true in spectacular fashion with Robert Eggers’ second feature, an unholy marriage of the myths of Proteus and Prometheus, rooted in a stew of seafarers’ lore spanning from Oedipus Rex to Edgar Allan Poe. The Lighthouse deftly projects Ancient Greek tragedy through modern medium: the typically smug and refined vernacular of the arthouse film - black and white palette, square ratio, selection of hipsterish facial hair - conspires to plunge the audience into the state of nature which it depicts. Rather than offering the detached satisfaction of an intellectual puzzle, common to the ‘psychological’ genre, The Lighthouse subjects its viewers to a taboo-violating sensory overload, forcing them to confront their own reaction to a torrent of elemental forces: storms and self-abuse, foghorns and farts, to chamberpot and onanistic blowback.

Like Eggers’ debut, 17th-century colonial horror The VVitch, The Lighthouse uses eccentric dialogue and an antiquated setting - a craggy outcrop in 1890s New England - to ‘spill the beans’ on the visceral struggle against the basic forces - isolation, boredom, hunger, frustration, madness and violence - which frame the human condition. The tongue-in-cheek transcendentalism of The Lighthouse comes in lashings of absurdist mysticism, echoing Herman Melville, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Beckett, Freud and Jung - all quite comfortably incarnated in Willem Dafoe, the shapeshifting gremlin to Robert Pattinson’s beleaguered straight man, in Eggers’ self-proclaimed “phallic answer” to his 2016 debut.

Eggers mused in a 2020 Den of Geek interview that in both films, “these boiler pot, contained pressure cooker situations (create) emotionally heightened experiences for people”; the director amped up the claustrophobia by paring The Lighthouse down to one location, and two characters who often seem to tussle over a singular identity. Simon Critchley notes of classical tragedy that “by focusing on a single action we are granted a unified concentration and a higher pleasure”; The Lighthouse shares this intensity, and the broader tragic aim to stir pity and fear in its viewers, then to expunge these emotions through catharsis. Whilst the film’s protagonist, Ephraim Winslow (Pattinson), dogged by a dark, inescapable fate and the secret crimes of his past, may not reach a clear and conclusive moral ending, he and the audience are buoyed along the way by smaller ‘releases’, either of the intimate and gloopy variety, or as bursts of uncomfortable laughter. The 110-minute deluge of non-stop stimulation lurches constantly between registers: hallucinatory sights and sounds, grotesquerie, extremes of acting style. Like a fairground ride, the disorientation is part of the fun, but also an involuntary, physical experience.

Despite sharing its basic plot components with Scorsese’s big-budget Shutter Island, Eggers’ film refutes the ‘psychological thriller’ convention of the solvable mystery hinging on a ‘big twist’. The Deus ex Machina (God from the Machine) plot twist literally appears as visual pun mid-stream, with Winslow hanging suspended then falling from the lighthouse. The meticulous refusal to conform to genre tropes mirrors the film’s central shapeshifting agitator, Thomas Wake; the wizened seaman lurches across the spectrum of primal expression, spraying booze, tears, and more viscous bodily fluids in his path. When Winslow slights his cooking, Wake veers from childlike dismay - “yer fond of me lobster, ain’t ye?” - to spewing off an elaborate curse, “more powerfully and passionately than any Tamburlaine or Lear. He calls out to the gods of the sea -- a man possessed”. Whilst Dafoe exhibits verbal dexterity and poetic diction worthy of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Pattinson took a method approach, joking that “Willem can actually act. I have to literally just say, 'Please hit me with a shovel.’” (LA Times, 2020). During photography, Eggers exhorted the actors as well as the audience, to come to their own interpretation, so the nuances to Winslow’s primal screaming and what Wake terms his “habitual self-abuse in the shed” are all Pattison’s own.

According to Critchley, Oedipus represents the perfect tragedy, and the archetype looms as an oppressive, inevitable presence in the interaction of the two characters, first taking form in Winslow’s feminized domestic subservience, and later in his equally primitive and deliberately animalistic attempt to master his senior. The homoerotic nature of their relationship results in cathartic hilarity or violence but instead of poking his eyes out in a bloody fury, Ephraim suffers an equally gory and mythic punishment, closing the film on a disturbing yet alluring image which, like every other shot, both demands and refuses a single interpretation.

Áine Kennedy is a London-based writer and manager of the ScriptUp blog.