The Lighthouse
The opening shot of The Lighthouse is of a large body of water, cloaked in fog. A ship gradually pokes it prow from out of the smoky gray wall. Music swells. And for a moment I was disappointed: how classy it would have been, I thought, if they’d allowed this first scene to play without a score. Then perhaps we might have had a movie on par with the restrained elegance of Ingmar Bergman, or the careful poetic realism of Marcel Carné. It’s not often that we get a black-and-white movie shot in old-school aspect ratio; oh, for the days of yore, when austerity was key and cinema was a tool for glimpses into the delicate yearnings of humanity!
But The Lighthouse is not that movie. In some ways, it is less — but also, in a big way, it is much more. The old masters had no reference points outside of their own work; the feats of Carné or Bergman were performed within a generation of cinema’s very birth. Today, filmmakers have the privilege of over a century of movies to educate — not to mention the spoils of home video and instant streaming. What was for our forebears a matter of discovery is now, for us, a given. When you have everything at your disposal, it is easy to go carte blanche; Daybreak or Through a Glass Darkly may be equivalent to a fine meal, but The Lighthouse is an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord.
The plot requires very little description: Winslow (Robert Pattinson) and Wake (Willem Dafoe) arrive on a tiny island to tend to its lighthouse for a period of four weeks. And things don’t go so well. Halfway through this movie, I wondered at how it could sustain itself for another hour. So outrageous were its events, so rigorous and dramatic its aesthetic — it didn't seem possible. Yet director Robert Eggers (who co-wrote the screenplay with his brother, Max) ups the ante higher and higher, until you’re beside yourself with every conceivable sensation: fear, delight, giddiness, fatigue. The Lighthouse is a tour de force, offering increasingly impressive riffs on a simple, potent theme: the power of the mind.
It is a movie of moments, and so it seems unfair of me to delve too deeply into description. Suffice to say, Willem Dafoe has never been more effectively lit, nor has Robert Pattinson ever be utilized to a more visually iconic end. Heaps of praise are in order for Jarin Blaschke, who photographed this beast; there are shots and sequences that loom close to the best cinematography I’ve ever seen. A bloody reach into white light… or a venomous curse spewed in the flickering glow of firelight. Computer generated phenomena and practical magic. Mythic tableaus and eviscerating jump scares.
I’m often wary of movies that are deliberately pretty; such visual care often comes at the expense of more meaningful or literate content. The Lighthouse earns its pictorial gutsiness — in fact, its meticulous visuality is synonymous with its linguistic genius (the dialogue draws influence from Herman Melville and the logs of real 19th-century lighthouse keepers): both qualities work to generate a world at once indisputably real and laughably impossible. You can’t turn away from this movie. You have to witness it.
Of course, it shocks at the expense of more subtle provocation. Don’t enter this movie expecting a grand philosophical inquiry, or a nuanced portrait of human life. (It closes with an image that places all of the preceding action within a very neat, or even quaint metaphorical arc.) Complexity is not The Lighthouse’s game; it takes a gimmick and runs with it, serving up more and more delirious outcomes until there’s nothing left to do but laugh.
Indeed, when the movie was over, I found myself jittery — laughing through the closing credits. It gets under your skin; it takes you for a ride. And it doesn't take itself too seriously. After a year of waiting for something to happen in movies, something exciting or unanticipated, I’m thrilled to say that The Lighthouse has emerged as a generous helping of cinematic bliss. It’s hard to know how long a movie will last, whether what is meaningful today will hold up to future inspection. But what’s undeniable is that we can learn from watching this movie. If not about ourselves, then about the medium: it’s a film that has ingested and absorbed the output of past masters, filtered it into a distilled, searing glass of kerosene. (Yes, kerosene.)
The craft is central here. That, and the audience. What a treat: to be handed a movie that doesn’t deign to condescend, or withdraw. It merely asks you to enjoy yourself. And to keep clear of the gulls.
