Coming out of The Lighthouse feels like waking from a fitful sleep filled with dreams that feel somehow significant, even if you're not sure what they mean or how they all fit together.
The opening premise is simple: Sometime in the late 19th century, two men, Tom (Willem Dafoe) and Ephraim (Robert Pattinson) arrive at a tiny island off the coast of New England to tend to the lighthouse there for the next four weeks.
What happens next, though, is much harder to explain. Suffice it to say the men descend into madness. Whether it's a product of their circumstances (boredom, booze, extreme isolation) or more supernatural causes remains in question.
If you've ever wanted to watch Pattinson batter a seagull in a fit of rage, or masturbate so furiously he falls down weeping, this is the film for you.
The Lighthouse is the second feature from The Witch director Robert Eggers, and it's easy to see how they sprang from the same mind. The films have some themes in common — the awesome forces of nature, the impossibility of living with other people, the utter creepiness of birds — as well as some stylistic choices, like dead-on period details and near-incomprehensible old-timey dialect. (In The Lighthouse, Dafoe and Patterson speak in a salty seaman drawl so thick, the characters themselves comment on it: "You're a parody of yourself," one says to the other.)
But where The Witch nevertheless felt accessible as a horror movie, The Lighthouse seems deliberately alienating. It's a grimy black-and-white film shot in a square-ish aspect ratio, giving off the impression of something made long ago and unearthed just recently. The sound design has the impressive effect of driving you slowly up the wall — you hear every creak in the floorboard, every fart and every tinkle, and it's punctuated at regular intervals with the oppressive blare of a foghorn.
The characters are hard to love and even harder to understand. Jarring imagery and ominous details rush in, then recede before you've quite figured out what to make from them. The tone, too, whips around like a flag in the wind: These men can be moved from hysterical laughter to tender embraces to blunt violence over the course of a drink, and we're alternately amused, touched, and terrified along with them.
This gives Pattinson and Dafoe plenty of room to play, and they run with the opportunity. Dafoe takes the crusty old sailor archetype and dials it all the way up, spitting out crudely poetic toasts when he's not puffing away at his pipe. The glint in his eye lets you know right away that this is a man around whom very strange things tend to happen.
Pattinson, meanwhile, gets a chance to show off his ferocious range. His Ephraim starts out reserved, if resentful — he's a rule-follower who hates that Tom assigns him all the menial labor and refuses to let him so much as step into the lantern room — before coming undone in spectacular fashion. If you've ever wanted to watch Pattinson batter a seagull in a fit of rage, or masturbate so furiously he falls down weeping, this is the film for you.
To this critic, all this weirdness is a positive. It's invigorating to see a filmmaker push his style toward the limits, figure out just what he can get away with, and work this hard to offer something that feels genuinely unlike anything else in theaters right now. It's an admirable effort, if not always a likable one.
Those who prefer elegant solutions will likely be frustrated by The Lighthouse, which raises endless questions but doesn't seem especially interested in explaining itself. Instead, the film follows a nightmarish logic all its own, enveloping you in noise and shadow until you can practically feel the salt spray and smell the chamberpots.
Before you know it, you've followed it into a hellish headspace where concepts like "time" and "reality" have become unmoored, where everything feels desperate and nothing feels clear. By the time it spit me back out, I felt I'd lived through something. Even if I couldn't tell you exactly what.
