A Tempestuous, Breathtaking Nightmare of a Lost Mind

“Steadfast, serene, immovable, the same
Year after year, through all the silent night
Burns on forevermore that quenchless flame,
Shines on that inextinguishable light!

The sea-bird wheeling round it, with the din
Of wings and winds and solitary cries,
Blinded and maddened by the light within,
Dashes himself against the glare, and dies.”

-Henry W. Longfellow, “The Lighthouse”

Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse is that rare movie that truly earns the label ‘psychological horror’.  Its’ terrors are deep and primal, simultaneously fascinated and horrified by the human mind and where it goes under pressure. Pluming the recesses of obsession, aggression, anxiety, sexuality, and desperation, the film has you perceiving the world from a mind’s eye clouded by madness, as turbulent and unpredictable as the tempest that rains down on this desolate rock off the coast of New England. Nothing is reliable. Everything is relevant.

It’s a movie about cabin fever, possibly. While the isolation and eventual marooning of contract worker Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) and his lighthouse keeper boss Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) does indeed drive a large part of the deteriorating mental faculties of both men, there’s more going on to chip away at Winslow’s sanity, including his troubled past as a lumberman and a curious fixation on the lighthouse lantern room which Wake forbids him from entering. Eggers and his brother Max, who he wrote the screenplay with, expertly convey a disturbed individual, lonely and frustrated, whom they frequently poke with bad luck and take joy in highlighting at his least flattering, such as in throttling a seagull and repeatedly masturbating to a scrimshaw mermaid. Probing his mind and the things it conjures opens a fascinating insight into his imagination and demons as a deluge of nightmares and illusions are unleashed; and as the Eggers’ force us to identify with him through this, it comes with disturbing implications about ourselves and the frailty of our own psyches. For his part, Pattinson more than rises to the occasion, solemn and secluded as much as he is boisterous and outrageous (the film is genuinely funny on a number of occasions). And he delivers one of the best portraits of madness on film in the last ten years, equally drawing us in and repelling our instincts.

His scene partner, the ever exemplary Dafoe, is as mystifying and haunting as our perception, warped no doubt by our protagonist, of his character is. Wake is a walking cliché of an old sea dog, with the grizzled look, the stern demeanour, and the gruff half-comprehensible speech pattern of a Popeye character. Yet he’s engrossing and bewildering, at times sympathetic and hostile, a figure of strange maritime poetry and ghost story alike, and Dafoe is as always a presence to be reckoned with. And he’s done justice by the strength of the Eggers’ script, which plays as though it was written in the time it is set (the late nineteenth century), but not quite so as to be off-putting to modern ears.

In fact the film thrusts you into a different time and reality from the first frame. The initial thing you notice about The Lighthouse is that it’s filmed at an aspect ratio of 1:19:1, much smaller than is seen anymore in conventional cinema. And the next thing you notice is that it’s in black and white. Both of these choices are expressly evocative of the silent era, and the films’ content supports that, often with extended sequences of no dialogue and a certain expressiveness in the acting that largely fell out of favour with the advent of sound. Eggers recognizes the terror that the silent form was capable of, doing his best to replicate the cinematography, lighting, production design, and atmosphere of the earliest horror films. The film is thus full of crisp shot composition reminiscent of Eisenstein or Lang, brilliant shadowing, sharp cuts, haunting tracking shots, tangible claustrophobia, and a foreboding dread. It creates images and moments that are among the most striking I’ve experienced in recent cinema. And these stylistic technical cues grafted onto more modern techniques of sound editing (including one of the most eerie motifs since The Shining), CGI, and a chilling musical score by Mark Korven, all used to accentuate the ominous atmosphere or blur reality, makes The Lighthouse a very unique beast indeed.

The film nonetheless hails from numerous aesthetic sources, from the surrealism of Buenel to the disturbances of Lynch, the gothic mood of classic German Expressionism to the impenetrability of Last Year at Marienbad; but its greatest influences seem to be literary. Narratively, the film owes a lot to old horror fiction of the gothic and post-gothic variety. It expresses both the macabre despair of Poe and Lovecraft’s horror of the unknown, fitting right at home in the canons of either author, with an ending straight out of Matthew Lewis’ The Monk. The setting and style, limited characters, gloomy build, and utter obsession with madness richly hearken back to that era of pulp thrillers and penny dreadfuls, Winslow as tormented and shaken as the protagonists of The Pit and the Pendulum, The Yellow Wallpaper, or The Shadow over Innsmouth. What so many of these stories had was a moodiness and mystery in their language, a vividness and eloquence of imagery, and a harrowing gift for metaphor and meaning. In capturing these devices and their execution so well whilst keeping The Lighthouse exquisitely visual and terrifyingly unnerving, the Eggers’ made what’s easily the freakiest movie of the year. And one of the best!

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