The Light­house – first look review

Some­where off the coast of New Eng­land, a boat emerges through the mist and tumult of the sea. Two men (Robert Pat­tin­son and Willem Dafoe) are head­ing towards a light­house on a remote island, a post­ing that will see them left alone with just the light, the ele­ments and each oth­er for four gru­elling weeks.

So begins this sec­ond fea­ture from writer/​director Robert Eggers, fol­low­ing his folk hor­ror smash The Witch, a prize win­ner at Sun­dance in 2015. The Light­house pre­miered in Cannes in Director’s Fort­night, and pre­dic­tions that a fol­low-up to an A24-pro­duced hip­ster-genre hit may lead to indul­gence (cf David Robert Mitchell’s Under the Sil­ver Lake, a con­tentious Com­pe­ti­tion entry last year) are bang on the money.

This is a bold, ambi­tious sec­ond fea­ture, shot in black-and-white, on loca­tion and on film, and pre­sent­ed in the boxy 1:1 Acad­e­my ratio. Cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Jarin Blashcke lights inte­ri­ors spar­ing­ly, leav­ing whole scenes in the island’s dingy cab­in to play out in near dark­ness, all the bet­ter to accen­tu­ate the life-sav­ing, life-giv­ing glow that peri­od­i­cal­ly illu­mi­nates the oppres­sive gloom.

Not quite a hor­ror film, The Light­house is more a mar­itime night­mare that finds mys­tery and mad­ness at the far extremes of human expe­ri­ence. Pattinson’s green­horn ​‘wick­ie’ becomes lost in a dai­ly grind of shit­ty jobs, some lit­er­al­ly so. It’s a cycle of cis­terns, seag­ulls and end­less swab­bing that stands in stark con­trast to the sole respon­si­bil­i­ty of Dafoe’s vet­er­an keep­er: to tend to the light itself. Mark Korven’s score and Dami­an Volpe’s sound design work in con­cert to sug­gest a churn­ing, unset­tling men­ace lying in wait as res­o­nant squalls rise out of the hell­ish land­scape itself. We soon begin to won­der, as the young man does, what secrets the light­house holds.

Eggers has cast The Light­house with the instincts of a silent film­mak­er, deploy­ing two actors with dis­tinc­tive, remark­able faces. For all their tal­ents and traits, Pat­tin­son and Dafoe are both cham­pi­on sour­puss­es, their expres­sions drawn and glum, and on Eggers and Blashcke’s film stock of choice, the crags and pores and lines scored into their skin are accen­tu­at­ed, giv­ing these famil­iar fea­tures a weath­ered tex­ture. It’s as if this footage has just been unearthed after a cen­tu­ry moul­der­ing in a Scan­di­na­vian doc­u­men­tary film archive.

Let’s not for­get, though, that these are actors in pos­ses­sion of tremen­dous reserves of dra­mat­ic blus­ter. Dafoe, in par­tic­u­lar, gives the sort of full-throat­ed per­for­mance that will be savoured and par­o­died for years to come along­side Antho­ny Hop­kins’ Cap­tain Bligh in The Boun­ty, or Robert Shaw’s Quint in Jaws. Eggers and his broth­er Max drew inspi­ra­tion for the screenplay’s dia­logue from the writ­ing of Her­man Melville and Sarah Orne Jew­ett, whose nov­els were writ­ten in dialect based on exten­sive inter­views with sea­far­ers at the end of the 19^th century.

Dafoe rev­els in deliv­er­ing the knot­ty ver­nac­u­lar, salty ban­ter and drunk­en sea-dog sto­ries, and he’s on top form as the ener­gy undu­lates across a scene from qui­et repose to roof-rais­ing fren­zy. Pat­tin­son, adding yet anoth­er killer cred­it to his envi­able actor’s CV, more than holds his own as a man beat­en down by his sur­round­ings and his sit­u­a­tion, and undone by iso­la­tion, desire and paranoia.

Far from an aus­tere Bergman and Tarkovsky-crib­bing cov­er ver­sion, Eggers’ lat­est is a pow­er­ful and unique vision – and one per­haps per­fect­ly suit­ed to a screen­ing in seat-shak­ing, water-spit­ting 4DX. Yet there are trou­bling, teas­ing themes through­out – about myth-mak­ing, mas­culin­i­ty, and the many ways the super­nat­ur­al reflects the repressed – all half-glimpsed through the rain and fog.