Robert Eggers does not make small films, and The Lighthouse is proof. The 2019 release runs 109 minutes and strands two lighthouse keepers on a remote New England island in the 1890s. One is young, silent and furious. The other is old, loud and full of curses dressed up as sermons. Eggers shot it in black and white, in a nearly square 1.19:1 frame, and the result is one of the strangest studio films of its decade.
Trailer, via A24.
Two Thomas, One Rock
Ephraim Winslow arrives for a four-week stint as a wickie under Thomas Wake. Winslow is played by Robert Pattinson; Wake by Willem Dafoe. The cast list complicates that: Pattinson is credited as Ephraim Winslow (fake) / Thomas Howard, and Logan Hawkes plays the real Ephraim Winslow. The name is an assumed one. The island is bare rock and bad weather.
Wake sets the terms immediately. Winslow empties chamber pots, maintains the machinery, hauls heavy kerosene tanks up the stairs and paints the lighthouse. He is barred from the lantern room.
Wake keeps that room for himself. Every night, he climbs the tower and disrobes before the light. Eggers never explains this. He does not need to. The image does the work.
Winslow finds a small scrimshaw of a mermaid in his quarters and keeps it in his jacket. He begins to see things: sea monsters, logs floating where no logs should be. He masturbates to the mermaid. A one-eyed gull bothers him, and Wake warns him not to kill it, insisting gulls are reincarnated sailors.
A Storm, a Dead Gull, a Broken Cistern
One evening, Wake tells Winslow his previous wickie lost his sanity and died. Winslow offers his own story: a former timberman from Maine, stationed in Canada, looking for a new trade.
The day before the scheduled departure, Winslow finds a dead gull in the cistern. The drinking water is bloodied. The one-eyed gull attacks him, and he bludgeons it to death. Then the wind changes direction and a fierce storm hits the island.
The tender cannot collect them. Winslow and Wake spend the night drunk. Rations spoil. Winslow finds a beached mermaid on the rocks. She waves and howls at him. He flees.
What follows is the part of The Lighthouse that has defied genre categorization in the press. It is not quite horror, not quite drama, not quite fantasy.
Pattinson and Dafoe Earn the Frame
The casting is the film’s engine, and it nearly did not happen. Pattinson approached Eggers independently. He first met the director to discuss a proposal to play a Victorian socialite in an unrelated project. Pattinson rejected that idea, believing the role would fail to challenge his acting ability. He came back after reading the completed script for The Lighthouse.
During their conversation, Pattinson showed Eggers a clip of an intoxicated man screaming “I am a demon” to express his understanding of the role.
Dafoe was harder to land. Eggers’s earlier proposals with Dafoe had not been fruitful. The director used Pattinson’s participation to convince him, because the two already had a rapport. When they met, Dafoe recalled Eggers being plainspoken: “There was no discussion. ‘This is the way we’re going to do this. My way or the highway.’ That’s very unusual, especially for a two-hander, for a director to say, ‘This is the way I see it. Yes or no?'”
Dafoe drew on his theater background with the experimental troupe The Wooster Group and worked spontaneously in rehearsals. Pattinson planned his rehearsing from discussion of the script.
Anya Taylor-Joy pursued Eggers offering to play the mermaid. Eggers opposed it. Valeriia Karaman plays the mermaid instead.
Poe, Wales, and a 1.19:1 Frame
The origin of The Lighthouse is a script based on Edgar Allan Poe’s incomplete short story “The Light-House,” written by Max Eggers. Robert Eggers researched further and built the plot from a nineteenth-century legend of an accident at a Welsh lighthouse.
The look draws from photography of 1890s New England, maritime-themed French films from the 1930s, and symbolist art. Principal photography took place in Nova Scotia, Canada, beginning in April 2018 and lasting slightly over a month. The narrow frame expresses the lighthouse’s vertical orientation and the isolation of the characters. Mark Korven developed the score, evoking the sounds and mythologies of the sea.
The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 19, 2019. A24 released it theatrically in the United States on October 18, 2019. It grossed over $18 million against an $11 million budget.
What the Film Actually Holds
Four things in The Lighthouse are load-bearing, in the order the source supports.
- The performances. Dafoe and Pattinson carry a two-hander with no third lead and no relief.
- The frame and the photography. The 1.19:1 ratio and the black-and-white stock express the island’s isolation.
- The sound and score. Korven’s work evokes the sounds and mythologies of the sea.
- The script’s refusal to explain. The mermaid, the light, the gull, the dead wickie — Eggers leaves all of it open.
Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson star as turmoiled nineteenth-century lighthouse keepers stranded at a remote New England outpost by a violent storm. That is the whole engine.
The genre confusion in the press follows from the film’s refusal to sit still. It has drawn multiple interpretations from critics, and the source notes it has defied categorization. That is a fact about the reception, not a verdict on the film.
The Poe connection is documented: the script began from an incomplete Poe story, and Eggers developed the plot from the Welsh accident legend and his own research.
The casting story is documented too. Pattinson showing up with a clip of a screaming man to explain his read on the role is in the source, and Dafoe’s account of Eggers — “My way or the highway” — is in the source as well.
The Lighthouse is not for everyone, and it does not pretend to be. It is a black-and-white two-hander about two men on a rock, made with total conviction and almost no compromise. That it grossed over $18 million against an $11 million budget says something about the appetite for this kind of film. That it premiered at Cannes and drew the praise it did says something about the craft.
Wake has the light. Winslow has the scrimshaw, the gull, and a story about being a timberman from Maine.
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