I must say I was a little apprehensive going in to this film. It was directed by Robert Eggers who directed the amazing horror film "The VVitch" (which I loved and reviewed here) but it was distributed by film company A24 who also released Ari Aster's film "Hereditary"--which was unsettling and puzzling--but also Aster's film "Midsommar," one of the most disturbing films, if not the most disturbing film I have ever seen in my entire life. And I was a film major, I have seen a s**t ton of films in my life, so for me to say that should carry some weight. I felt damaged and psychically attacked after witnessing "Midsommar," a film whose meaning, at a core level, expresses a type of mind boggling evil I think most humans never imagine and might not be able to fathom. So I wondered about "The Lighthouse" because it is billed as a horror film from the same company.
But I was actually engaged, pleasantly fascinated, and appropriately creeped out...and thankfully, Eggers' imagination does not feel the need to show an audience a world that is literally nauseating. Instead, he uses, much like his first film "The VVitch," mythology as a spring board to tell a story.
Essentially a two man play, a grizzled Willem Dafoe and a thoroughly gaunt Robert Pattinson play two men in the late 1890s who are dropped off on an island off the New England coast in order to tend to a lighthouse. They replaced the last two men, and their shift is supposed to last for a few weeks until a storm strands them on the island with the next ship unable to reach them. Dafoe, the senior of the pair, orders Pattinson around, making him do all of the menial chores while denying him the opportunity to tend to the actual light. The relationship between the men grows more complicated over time--more contentious, more intimate, more mistrustful, more friendly, even oddly sexual--while the isolation and storm tests their grips on reality itself. Pattinson begins having nightmares and visions while Dafoe seems to be jealously guarding the light and communing with mysterious sea creatures.
In fact, a creature plays an important part in this hallucinatory tale...Dafoe warns his helper never to kill a seagull because in seafaring lore, it is extremely bad luck. But every time he goes outside, Pattinson is continually harassed and attacked by a one-eyed seagull which he ends up killing. Bring on the bad luck. The presence of a kind of sentient, magical creature with supernatural powers is certainly reminiscent of the "The VVitch"'s Black William, a goat with evil connections.
But I think the most striking part of this story--and the most satisfying--is the idea that this is a modern retelling of the Prometheus myth. In ancient Greek mythology, the only beings who held the power of fire were the Olympian Gods but Prometheus, a Titan, stole fire from the Gods and gave it to Mankind in an act of charity. For his crime, Zeus, king of the Olympian Gods, punished Prometheus by chaining him to a rock; each day an eagle (symbol of Zeus) came to eat out his liver which grew back every night only for said eagle to return and feast again the next day. The light in the lighthouse is the obvious stand-in for fire itself, with Dafoe acting the role of Zeus and Pattinson as a wanna-be Prometheus. There are a few marvelous moments in the film that obliquely (and one moment not so obliquely) support this narrative.
All this is played out against an atmosphere that is claustrophobic and effectively fraught with tension and dread.
Recommend? Yes. Dafoe and Pattinson both give literally perfect performances. The black and white art direction is stunning, and the direction and editing are brilliant. Oh, as is the incredibly twisted and appropriate soundtrack.
https://a24films.com/films/the-lighthouse
