VOD REVIEWS: Robert Egger’s THE LIGHTHOUSE is a masterfully crafted nightmare

At the risk of alienating readers – I was never a big fan of Robert Egger’s 2015 freshman feature The Witch. What it did right, I felt it did very, very right. The atmosphere was thick. The film felt powerfully imbrued in its time and place. The harrowing lives of the story’s banished Puritan family in rural 17^th century New England were captured on film exquisitely. It all looked and sounded really good. But the danger in the film was lost over the narrative’s purposefully slow burn with a script which felt underdeveloped and outstanding performances counterbalanced by less powerful cast members. The scares were somewhat inventive, but overall familiar. Perhaps least inspiring of all was the dramatic arc, which from the first was obviously leading in one direction. Only the question of which family member was in dalliance with the devil was in play; that it was sure to happen felt inevitable from the beginning. That’s an awfully thin twist to hang your tale’s shingle on, at least for me. Certainly, the film was very well received by a large audience. But I always look for surprise in cinema, at least in an experiment like the Witch, and I didn’t find it.

It was therefore with some trepidation that I took on Egger’s second film, The Lighthouse. Those fears went unfounded. Every area in which The Witch proved to be pedestrian was elevated in this impressive sophomore outing (while every successful element was restrained). The only fears left for me came from the world of this masterfully crafted nightmare of a narrative which from the very first frame, announced it was embarking on a dead-end expedition to a terribly dark place. Dropping viewers into the deep end of a dismal black and white pastiche set in the eponymous lighthouse, which may as well have been situated at the very edge of the world, the terrors of what is to come is felt in every blocked shot with deft editing choices smoothly sinking us deeper into the madness of the film’s dual protagonists (personified by Willem Dafoe’s and Robert Patterson’s stunning portrayals). The island where these two desolated lighthouse keepers reside is regularly weather-beaten and pounded by an unforgiving sea. The structures are dilapidated and in constant need of repair. Taking place in an era before telephones and satellites, the two men are effectively marooned until their supply ship is to return several weeks hence. All of this is felt before we get far into the first act. Visual motifs are set early, used relentlessly to reinforce feelings of decay and despair, yet never tire the audience throughout. Vague nausea builds slowly as viewers themselves feel as trapped and bereft as the two men on screen.

A progressive kind of madness builds and builds in its angst as the second act churns like an angry ocean into the third. We get to learn a bit about Dafoe’s strict taskmaster dedication to dominating his charge with everything from gaslighting to wild swings between offering a carrot and wielding a stick. As for Patterson, this man running from a past he’s hesitant to confront finds himself walled in between the harsh work his on-again/off-again mentor/tormentor sets him to, and a burgeoning series of horrific hallucinations which range from the temptingly beautiful to the sickeningly morbid. What’s really going on? Are these terrors he’s encountering for real? Or is he losing his mind? And what of his master? Is he the madman in the tale driving his subordinate to insanity, or is the underling already losing his senses and is pushed to the brink by the surreal barrens of a lonely rock beset by swirling tides and hidden unknowns surfacing from the deep?

Here’s what I love about these questions in The Lighthouse: I don’t think they are answered. The events which lead to the disturbing ending might have all happened – or might not have. This is equally true of fairly commonplace conversations and what seems to be supernatural events. If you’re looking for a clean resolution to some clearly delineated storytelling, then maybe this movie isn’t for you. What matters here is the journey, the morbid trek through the nether regions of the soul rendered in atavistic scenarios. Terrors the human race may have believed it left behind when ancient ancestors emerged from the seas are recalled, turning out to never having been far behind. As the grotesqueries mount from the ordinary to the dramatic and the surreal, the audience can feel anxiety and dread building. And at the conclusion of the film is a single frame which may not explain exactly what happened but is such a stark image of legendary suffering that maybe we really don’t want too much insight into these infernal machinations.

Criminal neglect in the Academy Awards is its own kind of horror and I am not one to usually bring The Oscars up, but it should be noted. The only nomination The Lighthouse received was for Best Cinematography courtesy of the film’s DP Jarin Blaschke. It lost to the grandiose technical spectacle of Roger Deakins’ work in 1917. Virtuosity often loses popularity contests to expressiveness and it’s worth noting here because so much of the film pivots on what is seen on screen. Every single shot seeps the brain into a briny morass which you will get lost in. Bedazzlement of the 1917 kind is not here to make you feel as if you are soaring. Instead, you are put into the character’s predicaments. You are as disoriented, as forsaken, as far from hope as they are. Even the overt Lovecraftian tropes take a back seat to terrors of the inner mind searing in a storm of its own making. I’ll be thinking a long time about this movie and what it was really doing to my psyche through my eyes. And I pray I will never truly find any resolution to what all that really was.