Robert Eggers’ debut feature The Witch centered on an isolated and increasingly tormented family in 17th century New England, besieged by fears of starvation and witchcraft. Four years later, his second full length film The Lighthouse is similarly obsessed with the details of a particular time period, and the ways in which we are often the masters (and architects) of our own fears.
There are only three characters in the film, and at least two of them probably exist. Willem Dafoe plays Thomas Wake, a salty old “wickie” with a bum leg and a penchant for fiery diatribes, and Robert Pattinson plays the brooding Ephraim Winslow, a name he surrenders only begrudgingly.
The first act of the film concerns itself largely with the exhausting minutiae of keeping a lighthouse: scrubbing the floors and machinery, re-shingling the roofs, dumping the bed pans, treating the cistern, feeding the lamp with kerosene. We measure the passage of time by the lamp-lit dinners, held over a small table as the men haltingly get to know each other.
All of this is punctuated and enhanced by the bellowing call of the foghorn, and Mark Korven’s cabalistic score, which promises a brassy and discordant doom long before it comes. Attention to the late 19th century setting informs even the technical aspects of filmmaking: Eggers and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke shot on black and white 35 mm film, with a nearly square aspect ratio that recalls the early films of the sound era. It makes for an appropriately claustrophobic and monomaniacal view of our waterlogged subjects.
When Ephraim’s rivalry with a particularly quarrelsome one-eyed gull turns fatal (despite the superstitious warnings of Wake), the wind changes for the worse and the men are besieged by a fearsome Nor’easter. This is when things start to get truly weird.
As the storm rages and the rations grow thinner (and the drink flows more freely) conditions grow increasingly deleterious, and the men become much more closely acquainted, in ways that are in turns combative, tender and hilariously unhinged. All the while there is a growing sense of mystery regarding the beacon of light itself, which Wake jealously guards as a duty that is his and his alone.
The lighthouse is a not-so-subtle phallic symbol at the center of a situation that is loaded with testosterone and confused sexuality. There is a distinctly sensual implication to Wake’s time spent tending the light, while down below Ephraim masturbates furiously to a small mermaid figurine found in his bedding on his first day there. As director Eggers puts it, “Nothing good can happen when two men are trapped alone in a giant phallus.”
Things grow increasingly strange and violent through the second and final acts, and a not totally unfair question some audiences will ask is, “What did I just watch? What just happened?”
And that, narratively speaking, is a great strength of The Lighthouse. We are not to see or understand what was in the light, just how it affected those that did. There are some broad parallels to the Greek story of Prometheus, who stole fire from Zeus and was punished for it with a fate worse than death. Eggers has also compared Wake to Proteus, a sea god also known as “the Old Man of the Sea.” So there are overlapping mythic inspirations, but nothing definite enough to constitute a clear allegory. It is fitting (and maybe necessary) that a film which makes a portrait of madness would leave the audience with more questions than answers. Eggers and crew have managed to create another impressively bleak and nerve-rattling folk tale, and left it up to us to find meaning where we find it.