The Light­house

While Robert Eggers’ 2017 film The Witch explored the insid­i­ous effect of fairy tales on a small God-fear­ing com­mu­ni­ty, the writer/director’s fol­low-up shows how such sto­ries can cor­rupt the mind of an indi­vid­ual. Here, as with the fam­i­ly in his New Eng­land folk­tale, our hero, Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pat­tin­son), is essen­tial­ly exiled from civilisation.

The film is set in the late 19^th cen­tu­ry and begins as he arrives on a remote island where he is to work as one of two light­house keep­ers. But while the fam­i­ly of The Witch had each oth­er – at least for a while – Winslow and his col­league Thomas (Willem Dafoe) are essen­tial­ly alone, togeth­er. The pair aren’t exact­ly friend­ly (what with Thomas’ con­stant fart­ing) and are fur­ther antag­o­nised by the strict rules the old man impos­es on his under­study: Winslow is giv­en the most ardu­ous tasks, while Thomas awards him­self the priv­i­lege of tak­ing care of the light.

This sad sit­u­a­tion would at least have the ben­e­fit of being sim­ple were it not for Thomas’ pen­chant for chat­ter, drink and his repeat­ed attempts to get to know Winslow. Dafoe’s larg­er-than-life per­for­mance (the cliché́ of the limp­ing, row­dy seadog come to life) makes clear that these are mere cor­dial­i­ties, expres­sions of false inti­ma­cy of the kind straight men employ to con­sol­i­date their straight­ness. But Thomas’ mixed sig­nals, his cru­el per­for­mance of mas­culin­i­ty, con­stant rug-pulling and gaslight­ing do not sit well with Winslow, and not sim­ply due to the exhaus­tion of it all.

There is, of course, more to The Light­house than meets the eye, even if a quick glance is enough to hook us in. Jarin Blaschke’s gor­geous, almost square-framed black-and-white images evoke ear­ly-days pho­tog­ra­phy, but the set-up is no gim­mick: Eggers is a direc­tor in the full sense of the word, and while his com­po­si­tions are visu­al­ly strik­ing – almost obvi­ous­ly so, in a #OnePer­fect­Shot kind of way – they also hint at our hero’s anx­i­eties and mys­te­ri­ous past.

This con­trast between the blunt and the ambigu­ous is the fuel (or kerosene) that keeps The Light­house burn­ing. It moves the sto­ry for­ward while also mak­ing for a rau­cous and con­sis­tent­ly sur­pris­ing story.

It’s in the shades of grey of the cin­e­matog­ra­phy, where the dark­ness of the ocean fus­es with the oblit­er­at­ing white of the light. It’s in the gap between the sullen beau­ty of the ret­i­cent Pat­tin­son and the ram­bling blath­er of Dafoe’s grotesque char­ac­ter. It’s in the way the light­house is sim­ply both a venue for hard, phys­i­cal labour and a mys­ti­cal, phal­lic sym­bol. All of these con­trasts (con­tra­dic­tions, even) bounce off one anoth­er, as though in a mock­ing face-off. Winslow’s fears are sad and seri­ous in one scene, fun­ny and ridicu­lous in the next.

Eggers under­stands that fairy tales and super­sti­tions don’t per­sist because they are true or because they are absolute fan­tasies, but because they are both at the same time. Thomas men­tions that a man can be cursed if he attacks a seag­ull, and The Light­house func­tions in the realms of phys­i­cal real­i­ty (the seag­ull) and in that of the unex­plained (the curse). Winslow’s descent into mad­ness, there­fore, isn’t a slow slide into ter­ror, but a bru­tal tum­bling into an abyss, vio­lent­ly bump­ing against abject real­i­ty one moment and pure fan­ta­sy the next. Even­tu­al­ly, the two states merge.