Mark Reviews Movies: THE LIGHTHOUSE (2019)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 24, 2019

Watching as the characters of The Lighthouse—and the movie itself, for that matter—descend into madness, you wonder if you might have missed a key piece of dialogue, a tiny bit of exposition, or just about anything else to explain what happens and why. The simple answer is that at least one of the characters does, indeed, go mad, as he's stuck in a lighthouse with an authoritarian boss, no sense of time, and nothing beyond hard labor, liquor, and a statuette of a mermaid to occupy his time and hands.

The slightly more nuanced answer, perhaps, is also that he goes mad, although not just because of the isolation, the booze, and the furious masturbation to that mermaid figurine. He's also racked with guilt, over an incident from his past—the revelation of which sets in motion the genuine madness of the story's climax, in which the characters seem to temporarily switch roles or misremember things that just happened, before everything almost immediately gets back to relative normalcy again. There's also the suggestion that the other character is either becoming or engaged in some kind of nightly tryst with a tentacle monster.

Yes, the movie descends into that kind of madness, in which the supernatural may be real, breaking superstitions may have real consequences, and secrets come close to literally being able to kill. It's an old-fashioned yarn with an old-fashioned message: Don't mess with things you can't possibly understand, lad.

This is probably the more complicated interpretation of co-writer/director Robert Eggers' sophomore feature. It's not a story we're meant to take too seriously or try to dissect too deeply. It is, after all, just a story, filmed in such a way that it looks like a movie from the earliest days of the motion picture—in black-and-white and with a tightly boxed aspect ratio (Eggers even increases the film speed at certain points, giving those scenes the sensation of someone over-cranking an old projector).

The technique makes it seem like some sort of found object. The dialogue sounds accurate to its time—near the end of the 19th century—and its characters—a seafaring man and a general laborer. The performances feel lived in the moment, whether that moment be the uncomfortable silence of two men who can't stand each other or the outbursts of insanity that start almost immediately.

The two men arrive at the lighthouse on an island in the middle of the sea for a four-week gig. They're Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson, in an intensely physical performance that makes up for his shaky dialect), the laborer with something to hide, and Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe, playing an old-timey sailor just to the brink of parody—a fact that's raised within the movie), a lifelong seaman confined to land after a leg injury.

The most telling thing about their relationship—beyond the fact that Thomas treats his second like a slave and calls him a dog—is that Thomas doesn't even learn his partner's name until the end of the second week. Ephraim doesn't learn his boss' Christian name until the night before they're scheduled to be relieved.

Ephraim resents the way Thomas treats him, and Thomas can't stand Ephraim's inherent disrespect for his authority and for traditions (Folk lore about seagulls holding the souls of sailors serves as the jumping-off point for when things start to go haywire). The younger man desperately wants to work the lighthouse's lantern, but that's Thomas' domain. Much of the first act follows Ephraim as he does grueling and disgusting chores, like bringing an oil keg up a flight of winding stairs and cleaning out the cistern for fresh—in the most liberal sense of the word—water.

The signs of madness begin soon—maybe a little too soon on the part of screenplay, written by the director and his brother Max. Ephraim quickly begins to have dreams—of a dead body floating in the water, surrounded by timber, and a screeching mermaid swimming toward him—and visions—of that mermaid washed up on shore (although it might be a dream, which means his nightmares, tellingly, include his daily grunt work).

As for what's happening up at the lantern, Thomas strips naked and, from Ephraim's obscured perspective through the grating of the floor, becomes tangled up, moaning, with the tentacles of some kind of unholy beast. Through moments of mundaneness and madness, a fog horn blasts on the soundtrack, and Mark Korven's dissonant score seems to take its tones and volume from that noise, which almost sounds like the dying wails of a giant creature.

There's a pretty consistent sense that Eggers is playing with us—and not only in terms of what's real, what's imagined, and what might be part of an elaborate game of gas-lighting. The movie is wickedly funny at times (Ephraim's repeated confrontations with a particularly pesky gull, and Thomas' ill-timed and, sometimes, ill-aimed farts). It is also and generally an indecipherable riddle of a tale.

Eggers seems to luxuriate in the confounding turns and reversals during the elongated climax, when things—because of Ephraim's mind, Thomas' telling of events, or both—stop making sense. The Lighthouse is, for better and for worse, a maddening experience, indeed.

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