Dir. Robert Eggers. 110 minutes.
4/5
Gloomy young Ephraim (Robert Pattinson) has been sent to tend a lighthouse perched atop a football-field-sized rock off the New England coast. His mentor is Thomas (Willem Dafoe), a scurvy dog with a penchant for tall tales, sea shanties and loud flatulence. With no one but each other for company, Ephraim and Thomas are haunted by bad omens and an unseen presence that seems to loom over the island.
Like director Robert Eggers’s stupendous freshman effort “The Witch,” “The Lighthouse” is an artfully wrought tale drawn from Poe and Melville. Shot in striking black-and-white and with an unusual, almost-square aspect ratio, each shot is arranged with obsessive precision. Historical detail is profuse and uncompromising: while most period films are happy to throw in a, “Fare thee well, my lord,” and call it good, Eggers’s screenplay is stitched together from antique maritime slang hardly decipherable to the modern listener. But, even if you don’t know what a “cant hook” or a “wicky” are, Pattinson and Dafoe’s supple and oddly funny performances will tell you what you need to know.
The film, like the psyches of its main characters, grows increasingly unspooled as time goes on. During its final 30 minutes, “The Lighthouse” delivers so many reversals and breaks with “reality” that it becomes impossible to understand the dynamic between the characters or the implications of their actions. Is it possible to enjoy an infinitely stylish, infinitely original, infinitely well performed film even if it’s not clear what’s actually going on onscreen? See “The Lighthouse” and find out.
