The Lighthouse has all the hallmarks of an Eggers movie in its first hour. Retro accents and dialogue, tight framing and cinematography and a plotline that oozes with mystery, horror and intrigue. Unfortunately, this is dropped shortly after those initial 60 minutes and is replaced with a scattershot, arthouse interpretation piece that seems to say everything all at once, while concluding with nothing at all. Sure, many will find enjoyment from pulling all of the possible interpretation threads this movie has to offer, ranging from Marxist analogies of society, homosexual oppression metaphors and Greek mythological pantomime, but what is left under all that feels like a waste of a build up, and a waste of Eggers clear talent for storytelling and film making.
That isn't to say that The Lighthouse is a bad movie, far from it, but those looking for something on the same page as The Witch should look elsewhere. Both leads give some cracking performances, especially Defoe with his two hearty speeches that left the room silent in awe during my two viewings. I just wish they'd had a better narrative structure to follow so said performances didn't feel so hollow by the end credits.
Eggers has a unique style that I adore, I just hope his next outing is against a more refined narrative, and doesn't fall back on throwing multiple ideas at the camera and asking the audience what they thought stuck. Personally a disappointment, but I still enjoyed the composition of the movie as a whole. Heres to the next one.
This was a movie about how some people just don't do well in solitary settings.
Okay, I jest, but not entirely. This movie felt like a stage play, with the limited environments and extremely limited cast, not to mention the language involved. Many people would probably consider this an art film, and a movie that's being strange on purpose, but I appreciate it for pushing several boundaries at once. I expected Willem Dafoe's performance - he seems to be drawn to super weird movies - but Robert Pattinson was also a landmark performance. The way the plot dove in and out of both realism and fantasy was superb, masterfully done. Are these two men going crazy, or are you the viewer going mad instead? Was it all imagined by Thomas the younger? The sound design and cinematography were also amazing, all the creaks and drips and the blaring of the foghorn, the shots that are either so close or so far that you're not sure what you're seeing.
It was an EXTREMELY weird movie, and while The Witch felt longer than its 1.5 hour runtime (in a good way), this felt like it went on forever (in a good way). Those who are into such things might find that watching it while high or drunk lends it a different feel altogether.
"The Lighthouse" is shot on black and white 35mm film in 4:3 aspect ratio to evoke old expressionist cinema. There is a bunch of clunky closeups of horrified Pattinson that looked delightfully old-school, as well as a few moments that reminded me of Bergman's early films, but the general aesthetic approach and acting are extremely modern. It's an extremely slow and masturbatory film, but never to the point that you can't catch up with what you are being shown.
Just like in his previous film "The Witch", Rober Eggers uses the ambiguity of superstition as the primary source of horror. It's never clear if there was actually something supernatural in play, or if the characters simply lost their mind as they spent their days in isolation and alcoholism. Maybe it could be a little bit of both. Everything we witness could just be their own interpretations of the facts based on their limited knowledge and popular belief. Or it could all be just a huge allegory. Definitely, a film that raises many questions, but that does not need answers to be enjoyed.
The mythological and cultural references are rather explicit, sometimes even mentioned by the characters, but as they never get explained, it might be hard to understand if you are not familiar with western culture and mythology. The dialogues are also pretty hard to follow without subtitles if you are not a native speaker.
[8.3/10] A grim portrait of mutual madness. The Lighthouse pulls no punches in its devilish descent. Instead, it rubs our noses in the ruddy, bilge-ridden ugliness of it all. Two men, trapped on some godforsaken rock for days or weeks or months, grow bitter and affectionate and vulnerable and insane at once. There’s no respite from their sorry state, no sparing of muck or murder, just two near-feral souls torturing one another in isolation until their sad end finally meets them.
And I liked it.
The Lighthouse is challenging at times. It’s a slow movie, one that forces its audience to reckon with the passage of time and sense of inescapability at the same time its characters do. Its two leads speak in mumbles and old-timey slang that make subtitles a must for anyone who can manage them. There’s a maddening ambiguity to which of them is losing his marbles when and whether or not some damning supernatural forces are at work.
But therein also lies the film’s charm, if you can call it that, and certainly its uniqueness. The tale of loose screws while trapped in some remote locale is not a new one. Everything from The Shining to The Simpsons’ “Mountain of Madness” has played on similar ideas. What distinguishes The Lighthouse, though, is the way it crams the viewer into the cramped spaces the two main characters occupy, and with it, the equally cramped confines of their wicked minds.
The film sees sea-battered “wickie” Thomas Wake hire young and hungry Ephraim Winslow to join him as his second in the titular lighthouse. What starts as a rough four-week tour of duty turns into an endless joint imprisonment, as a storm stymies their way off and soaks their rations. Their tempers run short. Their grievances grow large. And their grasp on what’s real and what’s not starts to slip.
That’s all there is. I don’t mean that derisively. The strength of the film is how it feels almost claustrophobic in its single-minded pursuit of these two men’s deteriorating relationship whilst practically marooned together. Willem Dafoe gives a downright volcanic performance as Wake, rambling, coarse, entitled, prone to fantasy, and full of the salty seadog patois that his partner acknowledges as parody and yet feels plausible. Robert Pattinson recalls Bill the Butcher of Gangs of New York as Winslow, with a grumbly Nor'easter accent, nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic, and seething resentment and lingering guilt through it all. They are the film, and it’s to the film’s benefit.
That said, it’s a cliché to call a setting a character in the story, but hats are off to the production designers and cinematography team. The film’s creatives not only find and construct a structure and a setting that seems to lurch and lilt and respond to the goings on of its occupants, but they shoot it in such a fashion that it feels supernatural, bedeviled, or divine with enough subtlety to toe the line of realism. The spartan, crumbling, yet mechanically intricate environs serve the film’s purpose and mood.
The atmosphere may be the strongest point to recommend The Lighthouse. Even before things start unraveling, there’s a mordant, lugubrious tone to these two men marking their time in a wave-beaten shack. The deliberate pace, the mix between long takes and quick cuts, the sense of the entire enterprise as a doomed and haunted one, makes your skin crawl even before things get bloody awful.
Much of that owes to the brilliant cinematography. Like many modern (and classic) pictures in black and white, the lack of color adds greater emphasis to light and shadow. That’s particularly useful in a movie like this one, where the abstract concept of the light, who jealously guards it and who’s denied access, and the figurative fall into darkness of both characters, is so important and at times even made literal. In the same way, how the figures occupy the frame is vital to the sensibility of each scene as a whole. Who’s large and who’s small, who’s high and who’s low, matters both to the composition of a shot and to the slow-simmering tension between Wake and Winslow.
Their power struggle is also given form by the exquisite sound design. The purgatory of the place comes through in the loud foghorns that cut through the storm, the whirs and racket as the structure buckles under the wind, or the ear-piercing static of a laugh or a scream or both at once that defies sanity or sonic certitude. And as mumbly as the two souls at the center of the film can be, they speak in rock-ribbed poetry, often as beautiful and stirring as their itinerant curses are disturbing.
And those curses are hurled with abandon. At heart, The Lighthouse is a star-crossed power struggle. Wake must be in command, barking orders and demands at his lieutenant as the one scrap of authority he can cobble together in his sorry existence. Winslow grows in his hatred of being under another man’s bootheel, not free to make his own way for honest work. There’s hints that each has killed other men for failing to accede to or accommodate each’s gut-spilt preferences on this front, making the pair a tragedy waiting to happen.
Only sometimes, it’s a comedy waiting to happen. For such a deliberately ugly film, it can be strangely hilarious. The two get into a thunderous snit over who likes whose cooking. One gripes about the other’s farts. There’s half-winking acknowledgements of the ridiculousness of their situation and personas. Amid all the seriousness of it, sometimes The Lighthouse plays Winslow and Wake as the world’s most bizarre and unlikely old married couple, and it works for laughs in an off-kilter sort of way.
But they’re seemingly destined to tear into one another. There’s a worker’s polemic tone to this one. Winslow labors without appreciation. Wake bosses him around as though it’s his right. The sense of miserly callousness and put-upon resentment that roils between them speaks to broader imbalances and injustices. Those incongruities are given life by two people who seem made to hate one another.
So when they’re forced together without end, riddled with unsatisfied lust, unquenched anger, old lives lost amid waves and timber, the psychosis that’s tugged at the corners of both men’s minds comes out in full bloom. In the few moments where The Lighthouse becomes impressionsitic -- depicting mythical creatures of the sea, dead compatriots, and quasi-divine providence as the two men sink deeper -- it’s at its maximalist, gut-wrenching peak.
The steady escalation of their violent lunacy, with no escape for them or the viewer, is the thrust of The Lighthouse. The film is stark but gritty, fetid yet ornate, a vision of true psychological ugliness and horror rendered with striking cinematic beauty. With nothing more than two mortals extended dark night of the soul, it gives us a glimpse of their inevitable, rough-hewn ends at one another’s hand. As they drive each other mad, a force greater than either comes to wash them away, as each wrests for power and finds none but the brutal release of their empty ends.
In the 1890s, two lighthouse keepers are alone on an unnamed and mysterious island in New England. One of them (Willem Defoe) is a grizzled veteran 'wickie' who is joined for a month by someone new to the profession (Robert Pattinson). When a storm hits and they are stranded on the island, alcohol consumption increases, tempers fray, and the line between reality and fantasy becomes blurred.
I thought Robert Eggers had peaked with his audacious and brilliant debut, The Witch, but it seems he has hit pay dirt again with this compelling and disturbingly claustrophobic follow-up.
Willem Defoe delivers one of the best performances of his long and distinguished career while Robert Pattinson seems to be channelling Daniel Day Lewis for a powerhouse acting display which should silence his naysayers.
Shot in stark monochrome in the unusual 1.19:1 aspect ratio and with a complex and thoughtful screenplay, this delivers on aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual levels. As he showed with The Witch, Eggers again created a completely convincing period setting – the costumes, make-up, and production design are phenomenally good – and the dialogue between the two men could have been written by Edgar Allen Poe.
It's a film I intend to revisit soon (I streamed this on Now TV and ordered the Blu-ray the next day) and will watch many times to understand the sociological, mythological, and philosophical themes.
THE WACPINE OF 'THE LIGHTHOUSE'
WRITING: 8
ATMOSPHERE: 9
CHARACTERS: 10
PRODUCTION: 10
INTRIGUE: 8
NOVELTY: 7
ENJOYMENT: 8
The Good:
What Robert Eggers has done here is somehow magically marvellous. He's utilized classic filmmaking techniques of times gone past, including cinematography, editing and direction to craft a film that could have been made in the 1940s, but still feels refreshingly modern.
The haunting sound of the lighthouse foghorn, the sound coming from the lighthouse machinery and the natural sounds from the wind and the sea help bring this contained setting alive just as well as the many moments of pure silence. The sound design and editing have been carefully matched with the visual trickery to form a whole narrative of its own.
The music is probably the most haunting thing about this film. It's dark and ominous, and while it sounds like something out from a Hitchcock film it still feels more like something we've never heard before. It also complements the film and its psychologically demanding sequences well.
Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson both carry out career-defining roles. Willem Dafoe has never been scarier or more intense and Pattinson finally shows his dramatic acting skills - and trust me, he is better than what he receives credit for. Most importantly, though, these two actors manage to singlehandedly carry the weight of the entire film from start to finish by complementing and challenging each other. Dafoe has the best soliloquy sequences, while Pattinson has the best moments of expressive acting.
The contrast between the perfectly mundane scenes with the characters working or having a conversation and the intense sequences of psychological horror make this movie atmospheric and tense, as you never quite know what to expect behind the next turn.
Most importantly, you can almost feel the pain, agony and loneliness connected to the work and experiences these people go through. You don't know exactly who is going crazy or whether it's both of them, but you know that it’s not easy living and working on that godforsaken rock.
I love how the acting turns more intense and the dialogue more bizarre as the film moves on. Robert Pattinson turns better and better as we near the end.
The last act goes all out The Shining on the audience as our two protagonists descend into madness and turn against each other, finally turning the tables from the original set-up.
The Bad:
The basic premise of this film doesn't carry until the end. The final 40 minutes or so are out of juice resulting in a slightly overlong experience.
This might be one of those films that require multiple viewings to fully grasp. I don't know if there's supposed to be a deeper meaning to this film since the main plot is fairly thin and doesn't evolve a lot throughout the film.
The Ugly:
That night the Green Goblin and the Batman shared their life experiences.
WACPINE RATING: 8.57 / 10 = 4,5 stars
Review by Matthew Luke BradyBlockedParent2019-11-19T19:44:56Z
LIFF33 2019 #2
Time to spill the beans…’The Lighthouse’ is a masterpiece! I loved loved loved loved it! I loved every minute of it. One of my favorite movies of 2019 and I honestly don’t think anything can top it. A slow descent into madness that creeps into your subconscious and won’t be leaving anytime soon.
From the very first frame, I immediately knew this was going to be special. I was hooked throughout until the end credits.
Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson both deliver career defining performances. They play off each others insanity beautifully. I could tell just from the accents and dialect that plenty of homework went into making an authentic portrayal of the time.
Robert Pattinson is fantastic as a quiet and private lighthouse keeper that witness the madness slowly unfolding, but also feeds the audiences curiosity on revealing the strange happenings on the island. Pattinson is a chameleon when it comes to portraying characters.
Willem Dafoe, on the other hand, was mesmerizing as the old sea dog captain with a love for farting. His long and insane monologues are the main highlights, because it was so electrifying to watch it was hard not be captivated. He’s strict and often unpredictable, but once you see it, you won’t forget it.
I hope Robert Eggers continues making horror movies in the future, because right now he’s one of the best living directors working today. The slow-burn tension and lack of conventional scares seems to be his trademark so far. Every choice he made was so carefully thought out and the results is masterful. According to Eggers, they actually built a lighthouse from scratch and everything we see, including the weather, is genuine. Even if some tricky was used, it was so seamless I couldn’t tell what was fake.
I loved how the movie was shot; the dim black-and-white with the claustrophobic aspect ratio, giving it the appearance of a silent film born like a German expressionism - something you would’ve mistaken for a 1920/30’s horror folklore. Perfectly captures the time period and the overall dread. You really do feel cut off from the outside world and abandoned on this spectral-like island, and this black sheet of cloud strongly looming over the two men. A dark force in all directions, unseen but very eerie. The cold and heartless weather is a character itself. A big bully with salty intentions.
I adored the use of lighting through out, as the only light source is either natural light during daytime or candle lit lanterns, which cast many shadows that adds to the unease. There’s some gorgeous looking cinematography on display here. Seriously, even as am writing this right now I can memorize every single frame of this strange nightmare of a film. Absolutely breathtaking.
While the movie is mainly horror, but there is comedy sprinkled throughout that was actually pretty hilarious. Everything from Dafoe farting and some creative insults the characters would often spit at each other, which would later expand into long monologues that I sat back and watch in awe with a stupid grin on my face, because how something so silly can be so poetic. Never have I seen a movie that perfectly balances more than one genre so fluently. You can laugh at the moments where it’s suppose to be funny, but also take it seriously whenever it’s suppose to be taken seriously, which is sometimes all in one scene. The writing from Eggers is so excellent.
After only one viewing there was a lot I could easily dissect in terms of interpretation. There's masculinity and Greek mythology imagery that demonstrates a striking sense of power. There’s also a certain idea of sexuality being a sacred thing and the frustration it may bring. Or maybe it’s just a simple story about two guys on a rock getting drunk and then getting even drunker while holding each other until they drift off to sleep.
Overall rating: One of the best looking horror comedies of 2019.