Blow, Winds and Crack your Cheeks: Notes on ‘The Lighthouse’
An impressive follow-up to ‘The Witch’, Robert Eggers’ second film ‘The Lighthouse’ is a visual feast full of blood, spit and sea water.
Robert Pattison and Willem Dafoe play two lighthouse keepers at war with one another and with the weather, two Lears on the heath, as they drink and fight their way through a particularly grim deployment. Elevated above their carnality (farting is a particular theme of Dafoe’s character) is the light itself, which promises a spiritual and even sexual release. As the storm worsens and survival itself is threatened, the light may be their only salvation.
Eggers footnotes the film with a nod to the real literature that’s behind the dialogue and Dafoe’s character in particular is drawn from this source material. His sea-soaked vernacular certainly adds a degree of authenticity and realism, and yet also an otherness, a mythical quality, punctuated by references to Greek gods and ancient proverbs. The dialogue can be an obstruction at times in film (at one point my brother turned to me and asked ‘What the fuck is he talking about?’). It’s best to go with the flow and let Dafoe’s waves of brine wash over you.
On the one hand, the film is a gut-punch of the ‘real’. We shadow Pattinson as he performs his arduous duties around the rock, shovelling coal and heaving wheelbarrows in the pouring rain and billowing winds. The Artist Formally Known as Edward is in impressively stacked shape here as he prepares for Batman, and he charges through the film with admirable commitment. Using a ‘box-like’ aspect ration of 1:19, Eggers’ tight frames heighten the claustrophobia that triggers the maddened eruptions from both characters throughout the film.
The weather, incidentally, is practically the third character in this duologue, a presence that overwhelms even the two warring masculinities of Pattinson and Dafoe. Eggers does a great job of making every frame appear so beautiful and precise, and yet so dangerously under threat from the storm threatening its edges. There’s also some grotesquely convincing guts and gore, most notably a scene where Pattinson beats a sea bird to death against the side of a boat in a painfully long take.
Yet on the other hand, there’s an unshakeable fear through the film, a mysticism that carries the symbol of the lighthouse itself as its representative. Dafoe’s character treats the lighthouse like his own mysterious prison cell, refusing to allow Winslow to discover the divine and sensuous treats that lie inside. The audience are granted tantalising glimpses of the transgressive powers within the light but remain in the darkness and rain with Winslow down below. The elusive promise and escape of the light is juxtaposed against the accelerating doom imposed by Dafoe’s threats of divine condemnation and the increasingly ruinous presence of the storm.
There’s also an anxiety of purpose throughout the film, which other critics have criticised as lack of plot. But this is a key feature of the film, a lack of direction and movement imposed by the island of rock that the characters find themselves on. This is Vladimir and Estragon at sea, endlessly performing perfunctory ‘duties’ and waiting for a saviour ship that never comes. As with Beckett’s clowns, there’s a perverse joy in watching the two men oscillate so profoundly in their own relationship, from drunken brotherly infatuation to murderous rage. There’s a feeling of futility and unease that grips the best horror films (there are allusions in particular to The Shining), placing it firmly within the genre
In all, the film is a unique, punishing experience in which Eggers again pushes the boundaries of horror - and pushes his two actors to career-best performances.