THE
LIGHTHOUSE
- Robert Eggers -
by Charlotte Menut - January 2020
"Should pale death, with treble dread, make the ocean caves our bed, God who hears the surges roll, deign to save the suppliant soul." And with these words, out of the mouth of an old and rusty lighthouse keeper, come the sacred, the literary and the grandiose in a cabin where, seconds before, everything was either dirt or crudeness. On a “remote and mysterious New England island in the 1890s”[1], Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) and Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson), respectively a former sailor with a wooden leg and an ex-logger, are in charge of a lighthouse for four weeks. But the day they are meant to leave the island, the boat supposed to get them back to mainland never comes.
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Since the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs during the Cannes Film Festival and the enthusiasm it generated, The Lighthouse has been long-awaited by cinephiles. Indeed, if Robert Eggers had for his previous and first film The Witch recreated 17th century New England, The Lighthouse is the confirmation the director masters the genre of period horror film, telling “half-forgotten things at the perimeter of contemporary consciousness”[2]. With an astonishing black and white photography directed by Jarin Blaschke, the movie stands out for its formal beauty, its historical accuracy, but above all for the disturbing and mythological experience it offers.
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A large part of the experience of The Lighthouse resides in the sensation the film itself is from the past. From the beginning to the end, we are stuck on this small island with the two lighthouse keepers, confined within the almost squared screen. This 1.19:1 aspect ratio (ratio of the screen’s width to its length[3]), is only one part of the incredible work of Robert Eggers and Jarin Blaschke on recreating images of the past. These dimensions for example, were used at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century, that is to say at the time in which the story is taking place, for silent and early speaking cinema. Eggers and Blaschke also tried to imitate the heightened contrast of an 1873 film and picked into Kodak’s collection of rarities to reach a high quality, vintage-looking photography. The mise-en-scene was also carefully crafted, backed by a lot of research on the living conditions of lighthouse keepers at the time, giving a sensation of reality to this period horror film.
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Beyond accentuating the claustrophobic aspect of the story and limiting our visual field, the dimensions of the images increase the forced proximity between Thomas Wake and Ephraim Winslow, amazingly played by Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson. The tension is always rising between the young and spirited novice who has to bear orders and blames, his life being reduced to cleaning, carrying and digging, and the suspicious old man who makes toasts like it is what is keeping him alive. The two men are going crazy. But rather than being opposed, Winslow and Wake are very much alike, both proud, alone, and inhabited by secrets and desires. The frightening and disgusting Thomas Wake has a strange obsession with the lighthouse's lamp, repeating “the lamp is mine” as if the lamp were humane, while Ephraim Winslow is haunted by a mermaid figurine left by a previous lighthouse keeper. Their identities are sometimes conflated and their names exchanged, the question of words being part of the general madness that grows throughout the movie.
The language used by the two characters is also a stylistic achievement. If Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson practice an old and familiar English (what says ye, lad?), Robert and Max Eggers, co-authors the script, drew inspiration from a variety of literary references to write some of the most memorable monologues of the film. From the lines of Melville’s Captain Achab in Moby Dick to the work of Sarah Orne Jewett, a female writer from Maine of the second half of the 19th century, the lines of Thomas Wake invoke nature, mythology, and strike some scenes with surprising religiosity. Even if an unadvised viewer might not get the multiple references of the film, the result of such a script is a crypted language that leaves us captivated. Some brief and astounding images of legendary oceanic creatures, directed by the rhythm of the lighthouse’s siren, leave their mark on the viewer by adding to the mythology. From Poseidon and Sisyphus to Prometheus, they display the insanity into which the two characters have plunged.
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The sea, however, is the true enemy and protagonist. With influences like Murnau’s Nosferatu and Soviet cinema, Robert Eggers's Lighthouse is reminiscent of German expressionism. The director uses nature as a way to convey interiority and emotions. Through the dramatic setting of a desolate and windswept island, the sea becomes both the cause and the mirror of Wake and Winslow's madness. Using high-contrast and highly-stylized lightning to shoot his actors, Eggers displays the obsessive interiority of the two characters fighting against each other, against the elements, and against their own minds. The lighthouse keepers are both disturbed and disturbing and through their point of view (which remains limited due to the aspect ratio), we dive in their paranoia.
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The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers on the left / Battleship Potemkin, Sergueï Eisenstein on the right
The Lighthouse, with the incredible performances of both Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, with its astonishing black and white photography and its horrifying sacrality, might very well be one of the best films of 2019. So do yourself a favor and go watch it while it is still in theaters.
[1] A24
[2] Interview of Robert Eggers for Vulture
[3] New York Times