Robert Eggers produced, directed and co-wrote with his brother, Max, The Lighthouse. He based it on an unfinished Edgar Allen Poe story and a 19th century Wales myth. It stars Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe.
Two lighthouse keepers become marooned on a New England island due to a severe storm. Their food rations run out, but the booze keeps flowing thanks to a secret cache buried near the tower. Eventually this too runs out, and the men resort to drinking turpentine and honey. All the while their relationship toggles between friendly and abusive as their minds deteriorate under the influence of isolation and alcoholism. The lighthouse’s light also holds a special meaning for them that is never fully articulated.
While doing research for this movie review I found audiences and critics were at a loss on how to characterize The Lighthouse. Personally, I don’t think it matters. Genre was created to help publishers sell books. Writers used to never bother with it. That is why novelists like Henry James wrote realism (Portrait of a Lady) and horror (The Turn of the Screw).
As for The Lighthouse, the word that came to my mind was surrealism.
I am not an expert in surrealism, but other reviewers also employed that word in describing this film, so it’s probably accurate enough. Robert Eggers acknowledged the inspiration of symbolist artists Sascha Schneider and Jean Delville. Indeed, one scene is an adaptation of Schneider’s Hypnosis.
So it is that The Lighthouse is a series of strange images. This is a double edged sword. While it may provoke or even inspire, it may also baffle the audience. The ending is one example of the latter.
The Pattinson character (whose identity is dubious, so call him Ephraim Winslow) finally enters the lantern room, but its brilliance is too much for him to take. He laughs, screams and falls down the lighthouse steps. The final image is of him naked outside and being eaten alive by seagulls.
Are we to understand that he survived the fall? Seems unlikely. And if he had, how could he manage to drag himself outside? What motivated him to do so? And why did he strip naked? These questions are not meant to be answered. Rather, the audience is meant to relish in the artistic imagery of it all.
We view the events through Winslow's eyes - or, rather, his brain, which is not to be trusted. Therefore, we could say everything is imagined by him. If we were to adopt an objective view of the events we might see nothing more than two drunks babbling and fighting before one gets murdered and the other tumbles down the stairs. Gone would be the slimy tentacles and screaming mermaids.
But the fun - or aggravation - of surrealism is in the ability to subjectively interpret the events. Perhaps Winslow is in purgatory paying for the sins of his past. In that case, Thomas Wake (the Dafoe character) would be the instrument of divine retribution who predicts the Promethean end of Winslow.
Or maybe the island is a place where the veil of reality is thinnest, a place accosted by supernatural forces. Wake’s former employee may have gone crazy, have died or been murdered and then reborn as a one-eyed seagull. Wake, himself, may be the prophesying servant of the sea god, Proteus. Indeed, perhaps Robert Pattinson actually fucked a mermaid.
Whatever the case, a film like this only works when two components are spot on: writing and acting. I expected great work from Dafoe, but I was surprised by Pattinson. Both do a remarkable job.
As for the writing, Rolling Stone reports,
Both [Eggers] threw themselves headfirst into literature of the period, with a heavy emphasis on texts about the sea and/or the surreal: Coleridge, Melville, some Robert Louis Stevenson. H. P. Lovecraft’s “weird tales” were a fertile source of material as well. (Yes, there will be tentacles.) Once they discovered the work of Sarah Orne Jewett, a Maine-based writer from the period who was writing in a region-specific dialect, they’d found the voices for their characters.
The research paid off. The Lighthouse features two well written characters expertly portrayed by the actors playing them.
It won’t be for everyone, however. The surrealism will drive some away; the open interpretation will aggravate rather than delight them.
Movie Review: The Lighthouse
Found this film mostly baffling. I felt like it was missing something in terms actually conveying something to the audience besides just representing madness. Maybe that's all there is to it but then it is a bit thin and would have benefitted from being more visually arresting. But I appreciate the attempt.
It seems difficult to succeed with surrealism in films -- perhaps audiences have an innate expectation that everything they see is going to make sense. "The Life of Pi" is the only surrealist film I'm aware of which became really popular; maybe also some Coen brothers films, like "The Big Lebowski." Directors keep toying with it, though - and for a visual medium like the movies, I think it makes a lot of sense.