Starring: Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe, Valeriia Karaman
Distributor: Universal Pictures International
Runtime: 109 mins. Reviewed in Feb 2020
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This Canadian-US drama filmed in black-and-white tells the story of two lighthouse keepers trying to maintain their sanity while living on a remote New England Island in the 1890s. The screenplay for the movie was written by the film’s Director, Robert Eggers, and his brother. Both lighthouse keepers begin to slip into madness when a storm keeps them stranded on the island.
The film is a very loose adaptation of “The Light-House” by Edgar Allan Poe, and won the International Federation of Film Critics Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019. It is best characterised as a horror movie. It attempts to draw viewers into a nightmare version of what is happening, or could happen, to two men trying against the odds to stay sane as the waves crash around them on an island from which they have no escape.
The film opens with Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) accompanying Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) to arrive at an isolated lighthouse that warns people away from desolation. Thomas orders Ephraim to work hard by day on menial tasks, that he has no inclination to share. Ephraim resents Thomas’ treatment of him and tension escalates between them, creating a battle of wills.
Each night, Thomas goes up to the top of the lighthouse and forbids Ephraim to go there. The light at the top acquires special meaning. The film suggests “there is enchantment in the light” that ensnares both men. Ephraim is trying to recover from a sordid past, and doesn’t know what really happens at the top of the lighthouse. He is desperate to find out what he is being denied. He is angry that he is never allowed to be near the light and there are grim hints of unmentionable things occurring there when Thomas stands naked at night before the beaming light.
A storm breaks. Food provisions dwindle. There is no sign of a relief boat, and the tenuous grip on reality by both men ebbs away. Quickly, the film moves from one set of surreal images to another. The photography is outstanding, but very grim, and viewers are exposed to graphic violence that shocks, especially when the film’s gothic imagery moves into the realm of the surreal – for example, when a human corpse, still alive, is devoured by seagulls, and a frustrated Ephraim engages sexually with a mermaid (Valeriia Karaman) that is human.
This is a film about the descent into madness of two men, who are stranded in the middle of nowhere, and both of them embrace their madness together. The film’s visual imagery is striking and constantly confronts the viewer with bizarreness, that reinforces the danger the men face at every turn. The acting is outstanding. Pattinson and Dafoe deliver powerhouse performances which impressively capture their resentment and distrust of each other, but their behaviour slips tenuously into be-grudging acceptance of each other as insanity looms.
This is an idiosyncratic film, full of horror imagery, that has a macabre ending which intensifies the ambiguity of all that has happened previously. The viewer is left uncertain as to whether the film explores the madness that accompanies extreme isolation, or whether the real intention is to show supernatural forces at work that better explain what the film wants to show. The musical soundtrack punctuated by the lighthouse’s foghorn, and the roar of the crashing waves, establish a third foreboding presence that affects the two men throughout the entire movie.
The film heavily relies on body imagery, auditory and visual – and often crudely so (Ephraim has to cope incessantly with Thomas’s flatulence, for example), and it is deliberatively perverse in the imagery it displays. But the film brilliantly blurs the line between what is real and what is not, and shows a talented Director creatively at work. Robert Eggers, as Director, builds up psychological terror that blends the real and the unreal shockingly together. The movie is a cinematic experience that is very unsettling, but one that is bizarrely creative and menacing. But viewers beware – this is a haunting horror movie of gothic proportions.
Peter W. Sheehan is Associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting
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