‘Muscular gloom with hallucinatory flashes’ – The Lighthouse review

Robert Pattinson in director Robert Eggers THE LIGHTHOUSE. Credit : A24 Pictures

Two ‘wickies’ arrive on a remote island off the coast of Maine, dominated by its soundtrack. A looming foghorn drones, as if the gods are warning them to turn back.

A looming foghorn drones, as if the gods are warning them to turn back.

Soon, they turn to dominating one another. At first, the weathered old salt Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) has the upper hand and takes great satisfaction in ordering his underling Efraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) to fix up the island’s facilities. Battered by the weather, Efraim is forced to haul coal, service the cistern, to scrub and polish brass, and scrub again. All for no thanks or shits given. Having heaved a barrel of kerosene up the lighthouse’s spiral staircase, Efraim is greeted by a disdainful Thomas, who orders him to take it straight back down again – a moment of Sisyphean sadism, in a situation spiralling out of control.

From the moment Efraim bumps his head on the low ceiling of his new lodgings, to the tune of Thomas’ piss pot tinkling, The Lighthouse is a claustrophobic experience. It’s an atmosphere only accentuated by the square aspect ratio and monochromatic colouring, which in turn draws into focus the eerie glow and shifting shadows of this little purgatory.

It’s an atmosphere only accentuated by the square aspect ratio and monochromatic colouring…

When all you see is endless grey, all you seem to hear is the endless flatulence of your moody bunkmate, and all you do are the same unforgiving tasks over and over, it won’t be long before you’re seeing things in your peripheral vision; desperate, for any stimulus that might break such prolonged isolation.

Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson in director Robert Eggers THE LIGHTHOUSE. Credit : Eric Chakeen / A24 Pictures

Like the plays of Harold Pinter or Sam Sheppard, this two-hander is a tug of war, a scrabble for power. The mood pivots on a sixpence: from the tenderness of a fractious late-night slow dance to the abandon of an all-out bar brawl for two. Intermittently, the pressure-valve pops off and one or both of the men issues a torrent of Shakespearean insults, such as when Thomas invokes Neptune ‘to choke ye, engorging your organs till ye turn blue and bloated with bilge and brine and can scream no more’.

Like the plays of Harold Pinter or Sam Sheppard, this two-hander is a tug of war, a scrabble for power.

A wide-eyed and spittle-flecked burst of fury; and all because Efraim said he didn’t like Thomas’ cooking. You’ll do anything to hold onto your sense of yourself — a good cook, an upstanding wickie — when all the world is trying to erode it.

While Pattinson and Dafoe deftly contort themselves into varying shades of unravelment to provide The Lighthouse’s surges and swells, imagery is its undertow. The film is awash with symbols and allusion. From the Freudian (keys going into locks for intercourse/repression; bleak external landscapes for bleaker inner ones) to the mythological.

The film is awash with symbols and allusion.

Bad-tempered and greedy Thomas, with his long-beard, is like the sea-god Poseidon. Meanwhile, Efraim is our Prometheus, defying the gods by stealing fire: whenever Thomas is in the lightroom — and he frequently is, stripped bare and bathing, somehow sexually, in the beacon’s light — Efraim looks on covetously, like he intends to steal its enlightening power. Both men seem hypnotised by the revolving and intricately patterned Fresnel lens.

Williem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson in director Robert Eggers THE LIGHTHOUSE. Credit : A24 Pictures

Williem Dafoe in director Robert Eggers THE LIGHTHOUSE. Credit : A24 Pictures

Then, there are the film’s more idiosyncratic, tentacular knots of symbol and folklore. What to make of seagulls who scream like sirens and are said to contain the souls of dead sailors? Or when Efraim is interrupted from strangling a version of himself by a naked Thomas, who stands over him with blinding light shooting from his eyes?

What to make of seagulls who scream like sirens and are said to contain the souls of dead sailors?

Stranded on and between a rock and a hard place, and poised between the supernatural and untethered delusion, The Lighthouse combines a muscular gloom with hallucinatory flashes, marching to its conclusion with the steadfast inevitability of a sweeping, searching light.

Sometimes a lighthouse is just a lighthouse. Sure. And sometimes, it’s a giant phallus. A guiding light supposed to help ships find their way here becomes the site for two men’s dripping descent into darkness. Through storms, leaking roofs, booze, and fuel, The Lighthouse is a real keelhauling. Bottoms up.