A24/Director’s Fortnight
Nearly four years ago, a tremendous new talent exploded onto the genre movie scene with a kind of horror film we’ve not seen on our screens for years. That film was The Witch, and the filmmaker was Robert Eggers. The film was, quite rightly, hailed as a triumph, and wowed critics on the festival circuit, and audiences in cinemas when it finally hit cinemas in early 2016. The Witch was a slow-burning, totally unnerving, intensely foreboding terrifyer featuring a break-out performance from Anya Taylor-Joy, and the hugely talented Ralph Ineson. Well, Eggers is back, sticking with the same genre for his sophomore effort The Lighthouse, a similarly-themed but completely different ,Academy-ratioed monochrome seat-shifter with two dazzling performances from Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe.
The setting is 1800s Maine and a deserted lighthouse. Its sole occupants for the next four weeks will be Tom Wake and Ephraim Winslow, Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson respectively, who have been charged to keep watch and ensure things tick over. Wake is the forlorn veteran, a shanty-singing, constantly farting former seaman who has seen it all, but is now a loner with an injured leg, confined to the watch in near-solitary. He’s definitely the one in charge, allowing Pattinson’s newbie to do the more mundane tasks like maintaining the machinery and doing the cleaning – much to his constant dismay. Winslow is definitely not allowed to man the light, and wake warns the young man that one of his previous co-workers lost the plot and suffered from hallucinogenic visions during his time there. Winslow himself starts to encounter these as time moves on – he sees images of mermaids, kraken tentacles and hears deafening sirens coming from the lighthouse above.
Winslow’s descent continues into hell as the narrative slowly unfolds, though is best experienced knowing as little as possible going in. The cinematography – an almost-square box of confined hellish delight – is stunning; a heavily saturated, gritty grainy image so wonderfully crafted by Jarin Blaschke (who also photographed The Witch), that adds to the overall experience of the film. The sound design is overwhelmingly good also, the aural excellence enhanced by the ear-popping score by Mark Koven, which when combined with the continuous, striking visuals, creates almost unbearable fear and panic that intensifies throughout.
Related: The Lighthouse is getting rave reviews at Cannes
This is Pattinson’s finest hour – and we’ve seen him deliver in so many excellent performances in recent times, Good Times and the more recent High Life amongst his best – but his turn as Winslow here is something else. Dafoe too is outstanding, particularly during the film’s final scenes, though both show oodles of fearlessness in their approach to tackling such a dark, original film, and I’d be surprised if we see this pairing, the only performers in the film -bar a mermaid and a couple of other lighthouse-men seen at a distance at the beginning of the film, rivalled on-screen this year.
Eggers has not only matched his striking debut, but bettered it. The Lighthouse is a delicious, very impactful, utterly terrifying piece of genre cinema that pulls you in from the opening moments, but doesn’t leave you for days after. Pure, unparalleled horrific bliss.
The Lighthouse was reviewed at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival and will be released at a date TBC.
