Originally penned and published on 23rd September 2022, my spoiler free appreciation of this incredible film is now paired with my Youtube channel reading of my review recorded almost exactly a year later. So should you wish to join in with the ethos and spirit of the “Read Along” concept, you can, or feel free to skip below to my original written review.
I hope you enjoy.
Well this wasn’t quite as I expected!
The opening ten minutes sets the pitch black tone for this off kilter and oddball psychological horror that didn’t completely impress me but certainly disturbed me greatly. From the simple black opening credits announcing “The Lighthouse” we are immediately thrust into a black and white world coloured even darker, even blacker and particularly murky, misty and, setting the tone for the film, intensely loud. Waves crashing against the side of a boat approaching the shore of the island of the lighthouse, a continually loud foghorn that never, ever ceases, the constant ticking of a clock later in the piece, the sounds of driving rain, the creaking of floorboards and the rustic cottage attached to the lighthouse or the howling winds whipping up the storms that engulf this tiny island, the palette for your film is dark, blackly dark, and incredibly claustrophobically loud.
Seven minutes pass before a word is spoken between the only two characters in our bizarre play, and only then during an awkward and tense toast to the four weeks they’ll spend together managing and maintaining their remote rock adrift in a wintry ocean. The senior of the two warns his junior partner it’s “bad luck” not to share a toast and the ominous tones continue both during and after their first evening meal together as well as the silent passing of the crew they’ve been sent to relieve and the incredibly jarring breaking of the fourth wall as our silent “Wickies” or lighthouse keepers look directly at the camera, for an elongated stretch of time, and each with their own cold, dead eyes of dread firmly affixed for the audience to see. The older man appears calmer than the younger, with the junior partner looking near death, dishevelled and already utterly exhausted even before he sets about his arduous tasks of maintaining and caretaking the island, and almost single-handedly as the older, grizzled man is always watching. Always watching. A routine is set: incredibly hard and taxing work in the worst of wintry conditions followed by an evening meal and then dreams, nightmares, recollections, hallucinations and a spiral into a terrifying madness.
Here are your two principal players:
“Thomas Wake” (Willem Dafoe) Both a lighthouse keeper and “Inspector”, he is also, very firmly, the senior of the two men thrust into each other’s lives. Cold, distant and demanding of being called “Sir” at all times, the film is well into its middle Act before he relents, relaxes a little, and allows his junior partner the luxury of knowing his real name. Thomas Wake is “married” to the life of being a “Wickie” or lighthouse keeper and talks in drunken rhymes and riddles and technical gibberish as well as the tallest of all possible tales. But what is abundantly clear is that he is very much the senior of the two men who has no love for his junior partner and colleague, and a man he berates and bullies at every possible opportunity.
Thomas Wake watches, cajoles, demands, dominates and subjugates his junior partner in a frightening, horribly graphic yet utterly brilliant portrayal from Willem Dafoe.
“Ephraim Winslow” (Robert Pattinson) In this battle of wills amid a central theme of identity is a portrayal from Pattinson equally the match for his senior partner above. Always referred to as “lad” or simply “Winslow”, Pattinson is gaunt, unkempt, permanently smoking and permanently in a fug of depressive delirium when not being worked and flogged to death by his senior Inspector, Thomas Wake. “I’ll work as hard as any man” he exclaims, and he does, is almost forced to, and endures the harshest of treatment both inside and outside of the creaking and crumbling lightkeepers cottage he temporarily shares with Wake. His nightly visions, nightmares, waking dreams and “enchantments” demonstrate a crumbling mental state blurred by drunkenness that sees him “spill the beans” with a wraith like figure that is not his father, nor his friend, and certainly not someone with whom to be cooped up with inside a claustrophobically dark and cramped cottage on a rock in a raging oceanic storm. There is indeed a storm raging, and it’s not just on the outside of the cottage walls.
Directed by Robert Eggers in his second feature length film following “The Witch” in 2015 (this year’s “The Northman” is on my future must see watch list) and written in collaboration with his brother Max Eggers, “The Lighthouse” was critically awarded as one of the best film’s of 2019, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and saw an Oscar nomination for Best Achievement in Cinematography rightfully bestowed upon its director of photography, Jarin Blaschke. Together with the thunderous performances noted above, special kudos must, must be reserved for the heads of production, set decoration and costume design but specifically for the sound department on the film who have conspired to create a loud and intrusive background character all of their own.
The above is perhaps 45 minutes of deliberately vague insights into a film that seriously goes off the rails in its final Act but there has been much claustrophobic build up to the inevitable human explosion of maddening horror. Obvious themes of sexuality, duplicity, lies and particularly identity seep through its creaking pores in a bizarre, often surreal, very often unsettling and very disturbing psychological horror that is incredibly bleak at times, difficult to watch too and always through a moody prism of drunken despair and psychotic unhinged anger.
I did say this wasn’t quite what I expected!
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.