Pattinson, left, and Dafoe transcend the screenplay's weaknesses.
Any wickie will tell ya: ’tis bad luck to kill a seabird. But if you kill a seabird in the first act of a Robert Eggers movie, be prepared for a wild ride.
Writer and director Eggers (The Witch) has returned with another historical psychological drama with supernatural underpinnings. The Lighthouse stars Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe as two men sharing a four-week shift on an isolated New England island for the United States Lighthouse Service in the 1890s.
The Lighthouse works best when it showcases the conflict between the elder Thomas Wake (Dafoe), who insists on working the lamp himself, and the younger, less experienced Ephraim Winslow (Pattinson), who is left with the menial tasks.
When Winslow ignores Wake’s advice and kills a bothersome seagull, the winds change. Bad weather prevents Winslow and Wake from leaving the island. When their supply of alcohol runs out, they resort to their own recipes derived from the lamp kerosene. The conflicts escalate as Winslow and Wake battle the elements and their own mental states.
Eggers is a talented, instinctive filmmaker who vividly realizes the textures and tones of the worlds he creates. Watching The Lighthouse feels like curling up and reading an old short story, with its evocative black-and-white cinematography and old-timey look. When The Lighthouse focuses on the physical obstacles of living in isolation, and the dramatic conflict between a subordinate and his superior, the film is vibrant and alive. But the scenes attempting to convey Winslow’s subjective experience, including visions of mermaids and tentacles, are less effective.
The supernatural elements in The Lighthouse are far less interesting than in Eggers’ previous film, The Witch. In that movie, it didn’t matter whether the supernatural elements were “real.” The characters believed they were, and therefore the drama was compelling. In The Lighthouse, ambiguities between reality and hallucination must be sustained for the audience to care about Winslow’s psychological state. And at some point I just stopped caring (right around the time I discovered his name is not actually Winslow).
To put it another way: Winslow’s scenes with the seagull pulled me into the world of the film. Winslow’s violence works as a physical manifestation of his emotional state. Winslow’s scenes with a mermaid, on the other hand, border on self-parody, and I didn’t care if they had any psychological or emotional validity for the character.
Willem Dafoe is great, but you knew he was going to be great, as always. It is time to give Robert Pattinson his due as the most interesting young American actor working today. There are several scenes in The Lighthouse that, on paper, must have seemed ludicrous. But Pattinson always goes all in, and I admired his performance, even in scenes I didn’t think worked conceptually.
Hopefully after his big paycheck on The Batman, Pattinson will continue to work with directors like Eggers. Not everything in The Lighthouse succeeds, but there’s enough from everyone involved to make you look forward to the next film.
