Director: Robert Eggers
Screenwriters: Max Eggers and Robert Eggers
Cast: Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson
Arrr – ye all be a scurvy lot, boastin’ a tall tale of the sea be ye? That is not a line from Robert Egger’s 2019 film, The Lighthouse…but it could have been! The Lighthouse is Egger’s follow up to his film The VVitch: A New-England Folktale, which gained the director a lot of attention in 2015. Now Eggers is back with a film about two lighthouse keepers that will no-doubt have people talking…like a pirate!
The Lighthouse stars Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson as two lighthouse keepers off the coast of Nova Scotia sometime in the mid-to-late 19th century. Dafoe plays Thomas Wake, a grizzled, weather-beaten veteran and foil to Pattinson’s young, idealistic Ephraim Winslow. Wake and Winslow arrive for a four-week shift looking after a lighthouse as wickies, the colloquial term for this occupation. It’s isolating, hard work, as you can imagine, especially given Wake’s insistence that he is the only one who gets to keep the light atop the lighthouse, leaving Winslow to most of the hard labor and grunt work. At night, there’s little to do but eat, drink, and talk and much of the film is dedicated to these activities, but that’s where we as the audience learn the most. These men have secrets.
As the film progresses, we get quite a bit of insight on these men. Both have questionable pasts that have brought them to this “rock” as Wake calls it, and both are dealing with inner struggle that slowly reveals itself. That slow burn could result in a slog of a film; Eggers’s dialogue through the mouths of Dafoe and Pattinson goes a long way. First, a word about Dafoe. Whether you know it or not, Willem Dafoe has been quietly scooping up Oscar nominations left and right. Assuming he is nominated for this role (which in my opinion is a sure thing), he would be receiving his third nomination in as many years, placing him on the shortlist of actors like Meryl Streep, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, and Marlon Brando who have accomplished such a feat! Dafoe puts out a vicious, raw, funny, and technical performance as the gritty Thomas Wake. The credits express thanks to the dark Romanticist, Herman Melville for inspiring much of the dialect and language for the film, and Dafoe masterfully spits this lugubrious, Melvillian prose in such a captivating way that I searched in vain for the screenplay for this film just so I could read and treasure every syllable of exactly what resulted when poor Ephraim Winslow expressed disfavor with Thomas Wake’s prepared lobster dinner. It is a scene for the ages.
Pattinson too gives a layered and impressive performance. While his character has fewer eccentricities with which to chew the proverbial scenery, his performance is solid and aggressively mysterious.
For a movie with really only two characters and one principle setting, The Lighthouse is actually quite confusing; however, I would preface this with the understanding that this confusion is mostly deliberate. Writer/Director Robert Eggers layers the film with texture. Shot entirely in black and white with an aspect ratio of 1.19:1, the film resembles something out of German expressionism resembling films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu (coincidentally Dafoe played Max Schreck, the actor who portrayed Nosferatu, in the 2001 film Shadow of the Vampire). This places us as viewers in bizarre territory as madness and insanity are tropes often associated with films that look like this, and The Lighthouse, it seems, is no exception. Eggers uses Expressionist qualities to tell a fable-like story full of mystery and mythology that takes some serious unpacking upon its conclusion.
I certainly cannot say I got every bit of this film, but I can say that I enjoyed the ride from start to finish, and I look forward to reunitin’ with this salty cinematic saga again one day if the sea-god Triton grants it be so. B+
The Lighthouse is Rated Arrrrr as has a running time of 1 hour and 5 minutes.
The Peoples Critic 