Robert Eggers (2019)
I went to see Mati Diop’s Atlantics at Curzon Wimbledon in early December last year. It was a late morning weekday show and I was the only person in the theatre. A few minutes into the film, the screen went dark and stayed that way. A pleasantly apologetic Curzon person explained that the problem was a fault with the cinema’s air-con system. He didn’t expect normal service to be resumed any time soon and refunded me the cost of my ticket. I realised that, if I got a move on, I could make it to the next show of Atlantics at Curzon Soho instead, and I headed there. Now there were two other people in the audience. (It’s true the film had just started streaming on Netflix at the time. Even so.)
I’d not been back to Curzon Soho since, until The Lighthouse. Just as the trailers ended, the screen went dark – a power cut. There was barely a minute to think about symmetrical coincidence before power was restored and it’s just as well there was no need to relocate this time. As might be expected from the title, Robert Eggers’s second feature is, like Diop’s first, marine-themed. Both include some apparently supernatural happenings although those in The Lighthouse are more easily explicable as the imaginings of a disturbed mind. There the resemblances between the two films end. They’re oceans apart in quality.
It seems in box-office appeal too. This show of The Lighthouse was on Thursday lunchtime, at the end of its third week in cinemas. The audience must have numbered at least thirty, which may sound modest but, in my experience, is pretty good nowadays for a non-peak show in central London during the working week. As I watched the film, I felt it could surely appeal only to arthouse horror fans and/or those technically knowledgeable enough to appreciate the skill of Eggers’s image-making and willing to turn a blind eye to what some of the images show. If so, these constituencies are bigger than I realised. The Lighthouse’s international takings now amount to well over four times its $4 million budget.
The story is set in the latter part of the nineteenth century, on an isolated island off the New England coast. The characters are a pair of lighthouse keepers or ‘wickies’ – a grizzled veteran (Willem Dafoe) and a relative rookie (Robert Pattinson). (The film is virtually a two-hander, except for a few brief appearances by others, usually in nightmares or other visions.) Thomas Wake (Dafoe) is prone to flatulence and cackling-accompanied anecdotes. Ephraim Winslow (Pattinson) is morose, his bad mood made understandably worse by Wake’s farting and ribald humour, as well as by the older man’s persistent refusal to let him look after the lantern room. Instead, Wake assigns Winslow jobs like lugging kerosene containers and emptying chamber pots.
Robert Eggers (who wrote the screenplay with his brother Max) hardly bothers with creating a sense of foreboding: he’s straight into the boding. Even the opening sequences that describe Winslow’s approach to the lighthouse are dominated by louring skies on the screen and Mark Korven’s oppressive, minatory music on the soundtrack. What could possibly go right? It isn’t long before Winslow is having bad dreams and regular encounters with a pesky, ominous seagull. When he tells his companion what he’d like to do to the bird, Wake tells Winslow not to: it’s unlucky to kill a gull, he says, because they’re reincarnations of the souls of dead sailors. Winslow, needless to say, ignores this advice. The avicide and its aftermath are very different from what happens with the Ancient Mariner and the albatross. Rather than shooting the seagull, Winslow grabs hold of it and repeatedly beats it to death, anticipating the thwacking violence meted out to human beings later in the film. It’s hard to say that Winslow pays for killing the bird – things were hardly going well in the first place.
Nevertheless, the wind changes direction, bringing a storm to the island. Abstinent Winslow, on what should be the last night of his four-week posting at the lighthouse (but isn’t), gives in to Wake’s urgings to take a drink. The ferry expected to collect Winslow doesn’t show up next morning but the body of a mermaid (Valeriia Karaman) is washed up on the shore. Wake reveals that his previous assistant wickie died, soon after losing his sanity. Familiar consequences of screen isolation come to the fore. With the rations available reduced to alcohol and nothing but, Ephraim Winslow’s tongue loosens; he reveals that and how he came to have an assumed identity (one that he’ll keep for the rest of this note, though). At one point, he and Wake, with no other human contact possible, dance together.
The increasingly unstable reality – or of Winslow’s hold on reality – allows, among other things, repeated explosions of violence. After all, the previous explosion may not really have happened. The only word for this is overkill. Even when he buries Wake alive, Winslow forgets to take from him the lantern-room keys that he so covets. It doesn’t matter because Wake escapes from the grave, tells Winslow he’ll suffer ‘a Promethean fate’ and attacks him with an axe. The latter reciprocates and, with the keys at last in his possession, ascends to the lantern room – a flying-too-near-the-sun moment. Overpowered by the intensity of the light that he’s ineluctably drawn towards, Winslow falls down the lighthouse steps. In the film’s closing shot, he’s lying naked on the rocks, suffering the fate that Wake promised him, except that Prometheus’s eagle is replaced, of course, by seagulls.
Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson both look the part. As the weather deteriorates, Pattinson starts acting up a storm. He tends throughout either to mumble or to shout his lines with not much in between. In comparison, Dafoe is impeccably audible, though it might be better if he weren’t so. The performances in The Lighthouse demand a lot of skill (and energy) yet the effect is ridiculous. Although Robert Eggers’s debut feature The Witch (2015) was finally unsatisfying, it was absorbing to watch. The chief virtues of this new film – Craig Lathrop’s production design and Jarin Blaschke’s (Oscar-nominated) black-and-white cinematography – are put at the service of a ragbag of psychological horror-movie clichés. In one of several verbal showdowns, Winslow accuses Wake of being ‘a parody’ – a parody, that is, of a Melville-esque old salt. This is right enough. The film often seems like a parody too.
20 February 2020
