Robert Eggers first film (that he was proud of) was this adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe‘s short story. Due to shooting conditions that would endanger an elderly actor, Eggers opted to have a doll play The Old Man.
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7*. THE LIGHTHOUSE (2019)
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DIRECTED BY: Robert Eggers
FEATURING: Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe
PLOT: Ephraim Wilson attempts to escape his troubled past by seeking employ with the Maine Lighthouse Company. His four weeks of labor, under the supervision of the often tyrannical and always erratic Thomas Wake, stretch out indefinitely when the relief crew fails to retrieve them. Trapped on the lonely island, they both find each other to be increasingly vexing company.
BACKGROUND:
- Originally a ghost story (and, to a lesser extent, an adaptation of an unfinished Edgar Allan Poe tale), Robert Eggers and his brother Max, who co-wrote the screenplay, changed tack when Robert read a history of a pair of “wickie” Thomases trapped in a lighthouse off the coast of Wales in 1801.
- The distinct visual texture was achieved through a combination of custom filters and the use of early 20-century lenses. Lighting was also a challenge, with so many lumens required for the exposure that the actors were practically blinded during shoots of some of the close-up scenes.
- The Lighthouse‘s soundscape evolved from field recordings of actual weather and tidal events, later mixed in analog in the studio for a heightened, gritty effect.
- To sexualize what otherwise would have been a prudish Victorian-style mermaid, Eggers and company drew design ideas by studying shark genitalia.
- During production, there was no shortage of seagulls flitting and honking in the background—something appreciated by the filmmakers considerably more during the editing process than during the shoot.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: There are dozens of water-logged shots and scenes of mental deterioration, but the climax of The Lighthouse‘s frenzied, feverish collapse of sanity occurs in the penultimate scene, when the assistant wickie finally slays his demons and achieves his dream of witnessing, first-hand, the mysteries of the light atop the spiral tower.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Vindictive one-eyed seagull; visions of Neptune
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Eggers made his name with The Witch, exploring madness in an isolated community. With The Lighthouse he elevates the isolation and cranks up the corporeal unpleasantness in a story drained of color, drenched in water, and cramped by pared-down screen edges. The narrative perspective is unreliable, the psychology is toxic, and the obfuscation of water, liquor, sweat, urine, and more saturates both story and image. An ending that demands both a classical education and a willingness to shut up and run with it tops it all off.
Official trailer for The Lighthouse
COMMENTS: The Lighthouse is a considerable achievement in many Continue reading 7*. THE LIGHTHOUSE (2019)
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE LIGHTHOUSE (2019)
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The Lighthouse has been added to our supplemental Apocryphally Weird list. Please see the official entry.
DIRECTED BY: Robert Eggers
FEATURING: Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe
PLOT: Ephraim Winslow attempts to escape his past and earn good money tending a remote lighthouse for a month under ex-sea captain Thomas Wake; things get desperate when they are not relieved on schedule.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: What begins as “standard” art-horror keeps shoveling on the madness until you can’t think it can go any farther. It does, and ends on a Promethean note that looks like it could have been lifted straight from a sharper-imaged Begotten.
COMMENTS: I sat too far to the front to be able to tell you if anyone walked out of the movie (often a good sign for us), but I can tell you that it passed the next best test: right after it ended, a viewer queried loudly, “What the fuck was that?” I have to admit that that is a fair question. I kept alternating my “Candidate/Capsule” toggle throughout the movie, right up until the soggy, sickly, climax when two compelling things occurred. The first thing: watching Robert Pattinson burn away any mainstream reputation he might have had from his Twilight movies. The second thing: I could not have hoped for a better, more mind-popping final shot.
The first word of dialogue isn’t one, really. Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson), recently arrived to as remote an island as possible, makes a muffled grunt when entering his quarters. At the far end of the room, his boss, Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe), finishes urinating into a chamber pot and pointedly passes gas before beginning to hum. Ephraim, his environment established and his company defined, does his lowly duties, forever pining to tend the beacon that Thomas jealously guards. A one-eyed seagull torments the young man, until one day he responds to its attack by smashing it thoroughly to death against a cistern. This forgivable outburst is the catalyst for a storm that smashes against the island, changing Ephraim’s circumstances from mundane and miserable to forlorn and febrile.
Its frame ratio, as far as I was able to observe, is one-to-one[efn_note]Looking it up afterwards, it’s actually 1.19 to 1.[/efn_note], a presentation typically found only in very old movies. The motion of characters from one corner to the opposite diagonal of the screen just doesn’t have the same “punch” when there’s a standard panorama to cross, and the screen’s confines heighten the cramped nature of the setting. The lighting, too, hearkens back to cinema’s early days. The Lighthouse is set in the late 19th century on the edge of a watery nowhere, and the light comes only from occasional, well-diffused sunlight and dim candles. Willem Dafoe’s Thomas Wake, illuminated by a flickering light against the black room, was the stuff of comic nightmares. (His dialogue, the credits admit, is largely taken from Herman Melville, and every soliloquy is both bombastic and believable.)
Eggers drives the narrative in the one direction it can go—but while so doing brings in every horrible bit of natural humanity (Aleksey German crossed my mind on many occasions), grappling his characters to the edge before giving them a final shove into the roiling abyss. Knowing Dafoe’s filmography, I knew he had the chops; Pattinson, I have now seen, can match him. Dafoe is credited first, but this is Pattinson’s breakout-crazy performance (so here’s hoping he wanted one). Ephraim explodes in his final rant, its power almost a palpable force in the cinema, silencing the small crowd of hipsters. When the young man posed the question mentioned in the first paragraph, he was speaking for every viewer.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
THE WITCH & IT FOLLOWS (2015)
With the release of The Witch and It Follows, 2015 was an exceptional year for the horror genre. The Witch, Robert Egger’s directorial debut proved to be the more provocative of the two; not surprising, given that Puritan oppression as horror strikes close to home. Even more predictable is the expansive hatred for such an original film by formula horror fans. They’re a tribe of Neanderthals, too obtuse to recognize one of the ballsiest film of the last decade.
The Witch‘s subtitle tells us it’s “A New-England Folktale,” set in the mid-seventeenth century. It opens with family patriarch William (Ralph Ineson) banished from this Puritan paradise for unclear reasons. Like Adam and Eve, William and his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) are forced to flee to the wilderness, a forest setting that recalls numerous fairy tales. With them are their children, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), Mercy (Ellie Grainger), Jonas (Lucas Dawson), Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), and the infant Samuel.
Like most evangelical sects, William’s religion practices a type of anti-ritualism (setting them apart from liturgical competitors); but, as we see from his dialogue with Caleb, a ritualistic anti-ritualism ritualism sets in. Caleb is a willing subscriber.
Along with the rituals comes Puritan oppression, and a superstitious anti-superstition soon rears its horrific head. Thomasin, left in charge of Samuel, entertains him with a game of peekaboo, but on the fourth uncovering of her eyes, Samuel has vanished.
Did a scarlet witch abduct Samuel? Or, is Thomasin guilty of witchcraft herself? Initially, each family member professes guilt over the disappearance of Samuel, but true to the tenets of Puritanism, the antagonists—or imagined antagonists—take feminine forms.
In sharp contrast, Caleb, the male child, is his father’s candidate for godly martyrdom. The proof is in the pudding when Caleb’s holy innocence is tested, aroused by Thomasin’s cleavage. Taylor-Joy and Scrimshaw lead a cast that gives stunning performance, restoring our faith in acting.
The film is replete with beautifully horrifying imagery, including a blood-spurting black goat and one of the most unnerving finales in recent memory; straight from bowels of a Goya canvas. Eggers’ sense of period detail, as impressive as it is, is topped by his finding the pulse of the Puritan mindset. The eye of his hurricane is Taylor-Joy who, abandoned by God and family, spans a range in a single film that most actors can’t accomplish in an entire body of work.
It Follows is the second feature effort from director David Robert Mitchell, who impressed with his debut film, The Myth of the American Sleepover (2011). Teen Jay (Maika Monroe) has sex in the back seat of her car with current beau. Since the setting is the horror genre, we all know from the much-quoted Scream (1996) that this means certain death. Sort of.
Many commentators have honed in on the sex and death equation and see It Follows as a parable about STDS. Sort of. Cool and kinetic, It Follows revels in its paradoxes. When Jay’s boy toy copulates with her, he passes on a stalking demon that can take any form. It’s slow but lethal, and the only way to rid oneself of this shape-shifting ogre is to copulate with someone else before it turns you into beached leg of lamb. Sort of. There’s a catch, of course. If your victim doesn’t pass it on, It will return to Follow you.
John Wayne and Howard Hawks were mightily offended by Carl Foreman’s script for High Noon (1952), which depicted a narcissistic community refusing to help their neighbors. In response they made Rio Bravo in 1959, then remade it twice. It Follows has it both ways. To prevent her own demise, Jay has to play the narcissist, but she does so reluctantly, and depends on her community of friends for help (parents are out of the question, as it should be).
Mitchell chooses his predators smartly, ranging from a child to a naked old man perched on a roof. He clearly has fun pulling from a bag of personality types, embracing the genre tropes, and playing with them like silly putty. References to Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur‘s Cat People (1942) abound, along with John Carpenter (including Rich Vreeland’s score) but, like Lewton, Mitchell is not content to merely repeat the past. He’s too progressive for that, and for conservative horror geeks.