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At 2015’s Sundance Film Festival, director Robert Eggers made his directorial debut with his dark and eerie colonial drama, The Witch. For his follow-up, The Lighthouse, he ventures off the coast of New England for a dark and disorienting story of two men and their disintegrating sanity.
The Lighthouse travels to a remote island with Ephraim Winslow and Thomas Wake (Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe), two nineteenth-century lighthouse keepers who are sent to work and live together for four weeks. Grizzled old sea captain Wake is in charge, and though they’re supposed to share duties, Wake remains fiercely possessive of the light, while he forces Winslow to do all of the back-breaking menial jobs. And as the days pass, Winslow struggles with his work, with life at sea, and with this demanding, disgusting, and generally drunken partner.
On one hand, The Lighthouse is simply the story of a couple of guys who are forced to inhabit the same small space. If you’ve ever lived with a roommate, you’ll understand the ups and downs of the men’s relationship. These men are stuck together on a rocky island with no contact with the outside world. They live together, they work together, and they’re forced to deal with each other’s quirks and habits and bodily functions. Even if the film hadn’t been shot in stark black and white, in a format that’s nearly square, it would have felt tight and claustrophobic.
Of course, with Robert Eggers directing, you can be assured that this isn’t just a simple, straightforward tale of two men and their complicated relationship. It’s so much stranger than that. It’s dark and eerie and completely disorienting—and viewers are left to decide for themselves whether some of the things in the film are real or just some kind of troubled hallucination.
In the end, it’s all completely captivating. The cinematography is absolutely striking, and Eggers gives the film a decidedly old-fashioned feel, with a style and sound that makes it feel like a classic thriller. The stars give their roles everything they’ve got, too—and Dafoe, especially, spits out some of his lines like a man possessed. It’s mesmerizing, it’s sometimes oddly funny, and it’s often downright disturbing. And when it comes to its end, you’ll be baffled but breathless.
If you’re in the mood for something completely different, this is it. The Lighthouse is intense and troubling and absolutely bizarre—a film that you won’t soon forget (though there are parts that you might want to).
Listen to the review on Reel Discovery:
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