He recites the same poetic toast before each of the men’s evening meals (the rich archaic dialogue was drawn from Herman Melville’s writings and from real lighthouse-keepers’ journals). The other bodily noises made by the old salt are repulsive, too, although none of them is as infuriating as what he says. You can tell that Ephraim is going to have a bad time when he first peeks into the room, bumps his head on the ceiling, and hears Thomas peeing into a chamber pot for what seems like ten straight minutes. The cottage they share isn’t too small, but they sleep side by side in a narrow garret room. Pattinson is Ephraim Winslow, a taciturn drifter who comes to Thomas’s wave-bashed little island to help him tend to its squat lighthouse.ĭuring their four-week stint together, far from the New England coast, they will have no one else for company except a flock of aggressive seagulls: the souls of dead seamen, insists Thomas. Dafoe plays Thomas Wake, a veteran ‘wickie’ (lighthouse keeper) with a bushy beard, a clay pipe, a wooden leg and a plentiful supply of rum. Both of them could use their cheekbones as deadly weapons. The actors in question, almost the only people in the whole film, are Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, who seem to be competing to see who can have the most gaunt and hollow face. You realise that absolutely anything could happen – that there is nowhere the story won’t go and nothing the actors won’t do. Some sequences build to such overwhelming intensity that you grip your seat as if you’re on the deck of a sailing ship during a savage storm. But The Lighthouse is a bolder and more skilful film. Like that film, The Lighthouse balances horror and history: both dramas concern either the supernatural, or the psychological effects of being isolated in a remote, rugged setting.
Set in the late-19th Century, The Lighthouse is Eggers’ second film, following his acclaimed debut, The Witch. But when I say that those two men could be Captain Ahab from Moby Dick and Daniel Plainview from There Will Be Blood, and that they are trapped in what could be the holiday cottage from Withnail and I, and that their stir-craziness recalls Jack Torrance from The Shining, you’ll get some sense of how exhilaratingly strange and violent their ordeal is. In terms of plot, that’s all there is to it. Robert Eggers’ hallucinatory new film, The Lighthouse, is about two men getting sick of each other.
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