Taut tale of terror
The Lighthouse (R16,109 mins)
Directed by Robert Eggers
Reviewed by Graeme
Tuckett ★★★★
On a desolate rock, somewhere off the wild New England coast, there stands a lighthouse. And, as we are somewhere near the fag-end of the 19th century, it takes two men to run the beast.
Wake and Winslow are the men. Wake is an irascible, moody and embittered drunk (is there any other kind, eventually?) with a biblical turn of phrase and an apparent complete inability to ever blink his eyes.
Winslow, meanwhile, is a younger, leaner and seemingly saner man. But he is evasive about his past and clearly has secrets he would rather Wake – and the world – never learn of.
The unlikely pairing will tend the lighthouse for a four-week shift. They will not see another soul, bar each other. Clearly, nothing good will come of this arrangement.
The Lighthouse is a horror movie done just the way I like them. The screenplay piles madness upon madness, until neither man knows the difference between what is real and what is a vision sent to torment them.
Wake and Winslow are unlikely allies against whatever curse has befallen them, but also sworn enemies who blame the other for their torments.
That at least one of the men will not survive the film’s running time seems inevitable.
Shot – on film – in glistering black-and-white, in near-square 1.19:1 ratio, The Lighthouse looks – and often sounds – like an artefact from another century.
The storytelling evokes Coleridge and Melville – men driven mad at sea is surely a defining trope of 19th-century literature – but also (spoiler alert, if you were paying attention at school) works as a loose retelling of the myth of Prometheus.
As performed by Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, The Lighthouse is a taut, feverish and nightmarish film. It is as disturbing as it is occasionally shocking, but also such a thing of beauty it is possible to simply be happily absorbed watching it.
Director Robert Eggers and his cinematographer Jarin Blaschke collaborated on Eggers’ debut The Witch. As with that film, The Lighthouse keeps the tension at a low simmer until the very end, when all hell is allowed to finally overwhelm the men.
Composer Mark Korven – he also scored 1997’s Cube – lays a bed of discordant gorgeousness under every scene.
The Lighthouse is a sensationally well made film. It will literally haunt you. I’m looking forward to seeing it for a second time.