In 2015, director Robert Eggers released his feature debut with The Witch (also known as The VVitch). A hyper-stylized period horror film about a family of isolated 17th century settlers in New England, the film went on to be a smash hit, snatching up over $40 million in box office revenue despite a relatively meager budget of $4 million. It garnered decent critical success upon its initial release, and since then, the film has only grown in stature, and is now recognized as one of the best horror films (if not of any genre) of the decade. It was as a result of this success that allowed Eggers to actualize a project he had in the works for years before the release of his feature debut The Lighthouse.
Set on a barren and isolated rocky island off the coast of New England in the late 19th century, the story revolves around Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson), a former timberman who takes a contract job as a wicky (lighthouse keeper). His supervisor/boss is Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe), an unkempt former sailor who bosses Winslow around with the thickest 19th century Atlantic sailor accent imaginable. Winslow grows weary of being forced to perform all of the backbreaking tasks while Wake takes sole responsibility of tending to the light, and he soon begins to have various (apparent) hallucinations and slowly grows insane. The nature of the reality of the ensuing events becomes unclear as the relationship between the characters grows more and more chaotic and Winslow’s psyche grows more and more unhinged.
The film does everything possible technically to immerse you into its highly esoteric and specific world. Not only is it shot in a 1.19:1 aspect ratio, a practically square frame used by early 20th century directors like G.W. Pabst and Fritz Lang, Eggers and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke utilize lenses up to a hundred years old, as well as a custom cyan filter meant to emulate the type of film used in the late 19th century. The resulting image is an almost confining frame, with stark blacks and whites steeped in chiaroscuro. To go along with this, the production crew built the entire set in reality, including the 70-foot tall lighthouse complex on the coast of Nova Scotia. As a result of filming on location, the production team often had to bear the terrible weather conditions throughout the shoot. In fact, despite the film depicting torrential rains and bellowing winds for a good portion of the run time, none of the weather conditions were artificially created. Eggers’ intense desire for realism in this sense also carried over into his obsession with period language (as shown in his previous feature as well), as the director did extensive research into the dialects and vocabularies of the two main characters, with Pattinson’s character taking on a highly specific rural dialect of Maine, and Dafoe’s having an incredibly dense Atlantic sailor’s dialect which was, at times, almost entirely unintelligible. It is one of the rarest things in cinema for a film to feel as if the director achieved literally every technical goal they set out to achieve, and yet with this film, Eggers was able to masterfully craft each technical aspect of the film to his whim.
Despite all of that, the most remarkable thing about the film is not its technical glory, but its simultaneous balancing of wildly disparate tones throughout the entirety of its run time. The film often makes rapid shifts in tone, including eldritch horror, pure shock and awe, utter confusion, and even uncomfortable hilarity in a mind-bending cycle of madness. The full brunt of the tonal mastery of this film often lies primarily upon the shoulders of Dafoe and Pattinson (with a little help from Mark Korven’s tremulous score) in what are undoubtedly two of the finest performances of the year. As Ephraim Winslow, Pattinson plays a deeply suspicious and mysterious man with an unquestionably sketchy past who gradually allows the isolation to hack away at his psyche. His performance is full of chaotic energy, at times exploding with anger and at times lurking in the shadows with a watchful eye. As Thomas Wake, Dafoe steals the show in what is perhaps a supporting performance, thriving as the bedraggled and stump-legged old sailor extremely fond of soliloquies awash with references to the maritime. The resulting relationship between the two is always tenuous, at times exploding with conflict and other times full of drunken hilarity. This is perhaps best represented in one particular conflict where the sheer dramatic power of Wake’s “Old Man of the Sea” demeanor in combination with the outright absurdity of the catalyst for the diatribe makes for a cacophonous mixture of befuddlement and uproar that translates brilliantly on the screen.
On the surface, what the film is truly about is quite clear: two men head off to a distant lighthouse and tend to their duties. Under the surface, however, the movie hails from the Herman Melville school of man-versus-nature epics, a tale of two men trapped in a shadowy enclosure as the world collapses around them (or, one of them, at least). It is about the madness that comes with isolation and how boredom turns men into villains when their raw and deprived masculinity goes utterly unchecked. As Eggers himself eloquently put it: “Nothing good can happen when two men are trapped alone in a giant phallus.” Throw in some allegorical references to arcane stories of Gods and Titans and some real or imagined Lovecraftian creatures, and you’ve got yourself a masterpiece of unfathomable proportions, and one that feels almost entirely original as well.
5/5 STARS