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"The Lighthouse", Robert Eggers' second feature film ("The Witch"), is a gripping and turbulent drama that draws on many influences, though it fuses them into an artistic thriller that is both Gothic and historical. Filmed in the 1890s, imbued with fog horns and epic wind bursts, as well as a deeply archaic sense of myth and legend, the film is shot in austere and glittering black and white, with an image radically outdated 1:19: 1 picture format (a nearly perfect square, like that of a sound movie at first). This gives a strange, immersive clarity to everything that happens. The entire film takes place on a desolate island of jagged black rock, where a nasty sea dog, played by Willem Dafoe, declaiming his replicas in the manner of Captain Ahab on a banner, keeps the lighthouse there for four weeks with his new assistant Robert Pattinson played with fierce reluctance, then with an aggression that escapes him like a demon.
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These are the only characters in the film (unless you have a pretty mermaid siren, played by Valeriia Karaman, who reviews dream-like sequences), but that does not mean that it's is a minimalist drama. As a filmmaker, Eggers is a maximalist: he staged "The Lighthouse" as a fetishistic story of authentic grueling conditions, drunk meals by the glow of a solitary candle and a job ruthless physics, although the film is also a kind of ghost story (ghosts too). can be simple products, or not). It is also a combative two-handed game in which men, fighting for power and fellowship, chat, joke, quibble and leave as if they were characters written by Sam Shepard in a state of mind. sordid spirit.
"The lighthouse", made with extraordinary skill, is a film that you can not catalog, and this is part of its appeal (although it can also make it a marketing challenge). Yet, even if you have not seen "The Witch", you may feel as if you are looking at a supernatural dizziness. Dafoe and Pattison, who play these old-fashioned tricks, are fascinating enough to hold our attention, but the film also has its quota of megaplexes: a stubborn seagull that can be a living spirit, a glimpse of Neptunian's tentacles, the almost mystical character of Dafoe. attitude vis-à-vis the lighthouse stand itself, with its bright rotating glass beacon. What exactly is there up there? And what's really going on between the two men? Do we see a slice of survival, a horror film or a study on mutual slow madness? What about all of the above?
Both actors are sensational (and they work together as one), but in terms of incredible power, it's Dafoe's film. He plays Thomas Wake, the "aging villain", as a sacred element of kitsch – an old frizzy, bearded and lame sailor, the pipe held upside down and a marine pants marinated in gin. Yet Dafoe plunges so deeply into this cliché that he transforms it before our eyes into a complex and stratified character.
Thomas is supposed to train Ephraim Winslow (Pattinson), a dinghy who is trying to earn enough money to settle down, in the art of keeping lighthouses. But Thomas, basically, wants to be obeyed and considers Ephraim as his slave galley. He's a little tyrant whose former assistant has gone crazy, and Dafoe has a lot of fun playing with his tongue. Eggers wrote the screenplay with his brother, Max Eggers, based on the eccentric literacy of the salted dog movie on period magazines, passages from Melville, and the writings of novelist and poet Sarah Orne Jewett. The result is that Dafoe plays Thomas like a thug written by Shakespeare ("Curse me if there is not an old tar spirit somewhere in you, boy!"). His whole story consists of a line of dialogue that Dafoe transforms into a sad haiku: "Thirteen Christmas at sea. The little ones at home. She never forgave him. Supernatural or not, the true demon who haunts "The lighthouse" is the ghost of male loneliness.
As Ephraim, Pattinson gives an intense physical performance, trailing around huge barrels of oil and shoveling coal, hanging from a pulley as he whitens the tall lighthouse brick exterior (the entire structure was built to the movie, although you swear it's a real lighthouse that has existed for 150 years). He also masturbates with an ivory mermaid figurine. Pattinson can be a recessive actor and, for a while, here, with his drooping mustache, he seems to play another discrete drone. But the way "The Lighthouse" works, Willem Dafoe's performance is kind of taunting, and Pattinson, the receiver who's responsible for it, is up to the task – when he launches a speech about the fact that he is sick of listening to the old man, this is the most ferocious game of Pattinson's career. (Well, with the exception of the scene where Ephraim is unleashed against this seagull.) As the film moves forward, her eyes begin to burn in their sockets.
At one point, both men run out of alcohol and start drinking kerosene. They plunge into a dance of madness. Yet even in this case, their underlying duel continues. The film makes us wait for a revelation of last act and it does not happen as expected. "The lighthouse" continues to meet our expectations, making it a difficult call for commercial reasons. Can he connect with a mass audience? Maybe not as good as "The Witch". Yet the film, based on "The Witch", proves that Robert Eggers has more than just impeccable gender skills. It has the capacity to lock you in the fever of what is happening on the screen.
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