The Lighthouse

Year of Release:  2019

Director:  Robert Eggers

Screenplay:  Robert Eggers and Max Eggers

Starring:  Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe

Running Time:  109 minutes

Genre:  Period drama, horror

In the late 19th century, two lighthouse keepers (or "wickies") head out to tend to a remote lighthouse off the coast of New England.  When they are stranded at the lighthouse during a terrible storm, their sanity begins to unravel due to the stress, the lack of supplies, the harsh conditions on the island, their isolation and their heavy drinking.

Director and co-writer Robert Eggers first came to prominence in 2016 with his feature debut The Witch, and has come out with one of the strangest films in recent years.  Filmed in crisp black-and-white, with dialogue influenced by the journals of lighthouse keepers of the period and the works of 19th Century American writer Sarah Orne Jewett, with elements from Herman Melville, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Louis Stevenson and Edgar Allan Poe, the film mixes bleak realism, surreal fantasy and elements of lowbrow comedy (there are a surprising amount of fart jokes).  The film is almost entirely a two hander between Robert Pattinson as the neurotic newcomer and Willem Dafoe, as the irritable, superstitious veteran, both turning in fantastic performances, alternating between tentative friendliness, almost homoerotic intimacy, odd-couple comedy and real menace and threat as the balance of powers shifts in some unexpected ways.  The film almost feels like a queasy nightmare, and a relic from a previous age.  It's full of references to art, literature and mythology, and cinematically feels like a folk horror film from Ingmar Bergman or Carl Theodor Dreyer, although it properly belongs to a world far older than cinema.  This is a film that may not exactly be enjoyable in a conventional sense, but people will be looking at it and analysing it for years to come.

 Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson in The Lighthouse