The Lighthouse (2019)

Saturday is "Take Out the Trash" Day

Wickie-Weeks
or
Pardon Me, Myth, But I'm Having a Tiff with a Real Live Gull (This Film Has Been Formatted to Fit Your Fever-Dream)

Picture (if you will) a deserted island with one lone working lighthouse that never sees any boats, populated by two men named Thomas: one young, one old; one apprentice, one veteran; one false, one true. Two Thomases, doubting each other, lashed together like Ahab to the White Whale, on an island at once too desolate and too populated, and where madness is the constant forecast...with partially scattered mythology and superstition, fueled by an alcoholic rage. One would say batten down the hatches, but the demons have already entered the room, and crossed the threshold from...the worst episode you could imagine from "The Twilight Zone."

(Sorry, Rod. Hope you're not spinning)

You walk into a movie theater hopeful, but not anticipatory. One should not pre-judge without evidence. The proof is what you see on the screen, not the previews, not the hype, not the tomatoes, squashed or otherwise.

When the film starts, you think there's a mistake—first thing you see is a gray square—it's the view of the fog from a ship that's taking the next shift of wickies (as light-house keepers are known) to a small rock of land in the middle of a stormy sea. The film is in black and white and formatted in the rarely used Movietone ratio (1.19:1) that was only used just before the sound era. The effect is claustrophobic, whether outside on the island, where there's not anything that would approach a vista, or inside in the cramped quarters the two men are squeezed into. We're so used to wide-screens now (in all media) that something this fore-shortened makes you constantly aware of the narrowed confines—and lack of options—afforded to the two men cooped up in the wind-lashed tower.

The two lighthouse-keepers are Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson), new to the job after a career as a timberman, and Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe), a grizzled veteran of many shifts at this spot. The dynamic between the two men is immediate—Winslow will be doing the menial jobs, the maintenance, the cleaning, the chamber-pot duties, while Wake will be tending the light, making sure that it stays constant and true. Wake disappears for hours at the top of the lighthouse, while Winslow stays down below, as per her position and duties. Wake bars Winslow from ever going up to the level of the Fresnel lens at the light-house's apex. 

Things start to go south quickly. Wake runs a tight ship and, being a particularly garrulous type—whereas Winslow is moody, sullen, and not given to conversation—constantly badgers the less-experienced man on how to do his job and waxing about past experiences (including the last man in Winslow's position going insane). It doesn't take long for Winslow to admit that he's not Ephraim Winslow, but actually Thomas Howard, who took the name of a colleague's killed in the woods. Howard succumbs to the isolation, beginning to see visions of mermaids and bodies washed ashore, and, at night, sees Wake at the top of the lighthouse, naked in the beam.

Howard starts to snap, beginning to think that nature has turned against him, including one particular one-eyed seagull, who aggressively attacks him, until Howard grabs it and kills it. The weather turns fowl, keeping the ship from picking up Howard at the appointed time, stranding him on the island with Wake. And, once having been a teetotaler, Howard starts to drink...incessantly. Things can only get better.

Of course, they don't. The Lighthouse becomes as excruciating as a bad marriage—Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but without the social niceties. You got two guys in a lighthouse, both of whom are listing starboard, and pushed to the limits of a very limited space...and no women. So, there's a lot of farting, an entire conversation that is just the two men saying "What?", and quite a few instances of masturbation, to which I could only think "That's appropriate, because the director is doing it, too."

Give some credit to director Robert Eggers (and his co-writer brother) for creating a particularly unpleasant psychological horror film and for the wonderfully arcane language squawked by the actors*, and to Pattinson and Dafoe for giving it their all up to a decibel level of 12. But, criminy, it is a movie-experience almost intolerably unpleasant and devoid of charm, or even anything to be admirable. Then, to ultimately run out of ideas on how to end it, other than to assign some hither-to unknowable power to the lighthouse and have the film come to a crashingly obtuse end, just makes you want to re-wind your watch and pretend that the nearly two hours you spent in that world never happened. It's been a couple of months since I've seen the thing, and usually some obscure reason for being will percolate into my mind about something that might have made the experience worthwhile, but this one comes up empty.

What it could have used was a dinosaur.

* Try this Wake tirade on for size: "Damn ye! Let Neptune strike ye dead Winslow! HAAARK! Hark Triton, hark! Bellow, bid our father the Sea King rise from the depths full foul in his fury! Black waves teeming with salt foam to smother this young mouth with pungent slime, to choke ye, engorging your organs til' ye turn blue and bloated with bilge and brine and can scream no more - only when he, crowned in cockle shells with slitherin' tentacle tail and steaming beard take up his fell be-finned arm, his coral-tine trident screeches banshee-like in the tempest and plunges right through yer gullet, bursting ye - a bulging bladder no more, but a blasted bloody film now and nothing for the harpies and the souls of dead sailors to peck and claw and feed upon only to be lapped up and swallowed by the infinite waters of the Dread Emperor himself - forgotten to any man, to any time, forgotten to any god or devil, forgotten even to the sea, for any stuff for part of Winslow, even any scantling of your soul is Winslow no more, but is now itself the sea!"