Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse Plunges into a Whole New World

When I was little, I watched our VHS of The Little Mermaid so many times, the first ten minutes were all fuzzy and gray because the tape began to wear thin. I believe that this memory of being lost in that hazy gray-blue animated sea, a memory that was essentially ingrained into my developing consciousness as a child, had a direct, visceral link to the experience I had while watching Robert Egger’s The Lighthouse. Shot in black and white, The Lighthouse tells a historical folktale about a young man’s slow descent into madness. Vicious ocean storms trap two lighthouse attendants, played by Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, on an isolated island in 1890’s Maine, and what happens after that feels akin to even the toughest sailor’s worst nightmare. The Lighthouse took me to new places that The Witch did not: somewhere more hallucinatory and experimental, yet with the same underlying social commentary that I loved from Egger’s first film. 

The very first shot of this film starts off so gray and foggy it’s at first impossible to see anything. Even from the very beginning, Eggers fully employs the power of black and white film to better frighten and disorient the audience. This choice also offers a sort of elevated supernatural quality: blood appears to be a darkly unsettling black, the glow of the lighthouse lamp becomes this ethereal blinding white; it just makes everything that much more mystical and surreal. Also, by imitating classical cinema (it even has the same aspect ratio of early silent films, more square than rectangle) The Lighthouse offers that same sort of disturbing realism that the historical language does, as if this really is a true story that we have just unearthed from some forgotten library by the sea.

The overwhelming sound of this film also added a sort of maddening hallucinatory quality, the siren wail of the lighthouse’s machinery and the deafening score overwhelmed me as an audience member just as it did the main characters. One of the very last shots of this film demonstrates this excellent blend of experimental sound and cinematography quite well. The camera holds close on Robert Pattison’s face as he laughs and laughs and eventually screams at such a high pitch, the sound distorts and sounds inhuman. The image of his face too becomes so overexposed by the light it blurs, reminding me of trance films of the 1960’s. Overall this film had a dreamier demonic mood to it than The Witch’s more concrete Pagan feel and I was here for it.

As for social commentary, when I saw Robert Eggers discuss this film at the American Director’s panel earlier this week, he described the crux of this narrative as: “putting these two men into a giant phallus and seeing where we go from there”. This is a very apt description of the power plays that occur between Dafoe’s and Pattinson’s characters, with homosexual undercurrents running throughout their relationship. While The Witch explored how our Christian patriarchy fears and rejects the process of becoming a woman and feminine sexuality itself, this film dives into how our social restrictions also impact our expectations of what it means to be a man. 

Our two main characters battle for control over this isolated world. While at first Dafoe’s character, Thomas, clearly “wears the pants” in this relationship, referring to Ephraim, Pattinson’s character, as ‘dog’ and ‘lad’ exclusively, continuously berating and degrading him, Ephraim is soon pushed to the breaking point. When Ephraim fully loses his mind, he makes Thomas bark like the dog he always called him, crawl on the ground, leads him by a leash, and tells him to “roll over” at one point implying a possible rape. 

These two characters just seemed to brim with toxic masculinity and homophobia. Anytime these two became close to being intimate or vulnerable with each other, having moments where’d they’d dance and cuddle, immediately afterwards one of them would fly off the handle and put up a defensive front. It’s as if this toxic compulsion for dominance that our society instills into males has completely corrupted both of their capabilities to ever actually love or be loved. This also explains why both men are unable to experience love for women either: Thomas has left his wife and all of his children behind for the lighthouse (the big phallus) and Ephraim can only really love or become sexually aroused by the fantasy of a woman: the mermaid he sees over and over in his visions. The mermaid herself is devoid of a human woman’s vagina and instead has an oversized caricature of one on the front of her tail. When Ephraim masturbates, its literally to a fake figurine version of this creature. I just thought Eggers masterfully tugged on these social threads and really pushed me to think more about how our society experiences gender and all of the expectations that come with it.

With all that being said, my sole complaint for this film is: I want more mermaids!!! My obsession for mermaids as a child went beyond my favorite Disney princess: it also influenced the Halloween costumes I wore to short stories I’ve written to dreams I’ve had so you can imagine my excitement at the appearance of these mythical creatures in this film, and my disappointment at the few minutes of screen time they actually got. I do get that Ephraim’s descent into madness involved so much more than just this obsession with the siren and her infrequent appearances goes towards this fantasy/hallucinatory feeling, but I just think there were some missed opportunities (she never even sang or drowned anybody L). However, these creatures, along with the other religious and mythological symbols, are really what made me fully fall in love with this film. I just wish there was more of the magical beings that ensnared me from childhood. 

Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Directors’ Fortnight), May 20, 2019. Running time: 110 MIN.

PRODUCTION: An A24 release of an A24, New Regency, RT Features production. Producers: Youree Henley, Lourenço Sant’ Anna, Rodrigo Teixeira, Jay Van Hoy. Executive producers: Arnon Milchan, Yariv Milchan, Michael Schaefer, Josh Peters, Isaac Ericson, Sophie Mas, Caito Oritz, Rodrigo Gutierrez, Chris Columbus, Eleanor Columbus. 

CREW: Director: Robert Eggers. Screenplay: Robert Eggers, Max Eggers. Camera (color, widescreen): Jarin Blaschke. Editor: Louise Ford. Music: Mark Korven. 

WITH: Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe, Valeriia Karaman.