In the spirit of reviewing things other than obscure horror films from the ’80s, I’ll be spending the next few weeks dusting off some less eldritch cinematic creatures from the long-ago year of 2019, a uniquely intriguing year for the cinema and the final year before the industry took an extended hiatus for reasons I do not have to clarify.

In the beginning, there is only a boat clarifying its way out of the foggy sea, a speck of uncertainty coagulating its way out of the graininess of the film stock. The Lighthouse begins in the ether, in other words, with a material thing etching itself out of the two nebulous spaces we call the ocean and cinema. Over the subsequent 100 minutes, David Eggers’ film will stage and then vandalize the attempt to escape it. Finally, the belief in the distinctly human attempt to solidify stable things, to escape the all-consuming and finally formless world we come from and will return to, becomes a cruel trick of the gods. The Lighthouse is an otherworld, a confounding out-of-the-way that is also, in its overflowing sensory exertions and heaving presences, an all-around-us. It’s always there, an omnipresent sensorial experience. But it also feels like it is perpetually drifting into nothingness. It is both a force and a void of a film, a dimly visible but often sensible appreciation for the unclarifiable. As a film, it’s everywhere, on all sides of us, but you get the sense that you see it less than it can see you. The boat will deliver two men to a lighthouse off the coast of New England. It also delivers the strangest of dispatches to us.

The Lighthouse is a horror film of the mind and the body. It has as much in common with Tarkovsky as Cronenberg. It’s a spiritual lament, but also a corporeal act, a film in which places, machines, and bodies require upkeep, in which mending and releasing are acts of the flesh, the mind, and the spirit. The light of the lighthouse the two men operate is a terrible siren beckoning the soul to its furthest reaches, but it also needs oil to keep running. The cistern of drinkable water looks like celestial sludge, but it also needs to be churned. The film’s soundscape (by sound designer Damian Volpe and composer Mark Korven) is thoroughly otherworldly, but it also must make due with Willem Dafoe’s perennial farts. And a peek from above into a bedroom offers a writhing intimation of a body that might be engaging in some eldritch ritual of cosmic undoing, but it’s probably just the more everyday unknowable of masturbation behind a closed door. A seagull is an omen of ill intent and an unthinkable cosmos, but it’s also a blank thing that just doesn’t care about us that much, and doesn’t really want to bear the weight of our symbolic readings of it.

It’s the 1890s, and never, and always. Weird intangibles skitter a path through this film and off the coast of New England. The two weirdest are Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) and Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe), presently on a four week shift manning a lighthouse off the coast. With little to do except endure the testy company of one another, and the protean invitations and disturbances of the sea and the wind, and the gnawing sense that the light shines too brightly, theirs is a tale of maritime madness, a story at the edge of the perceived world, but also the limit of the perceiving mind. Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography captures an unfathomable glimpse of the darkest nights of the human psyche, and Korven’s otherworldly cacophony of horns and wails threaten to rend it, presenting a cosmic conundrum where questions of the personal and the planetary are equally opaque and troubling. It’s a Lovecraftian tale, and an unusually direct one at that, a film in which the body seems ready for invasion, in which the mind seems all too enticing a home for murmurs and suggestions that might come from within or without. This is a world in which the undulations of a tentacle you might have seen caressing the light are as uncanny as the close-up of your wavering eye that might have seen them.

The Lighthouse, then, is a work of maximalist minimalism, a heaving and restless sensory experience that nonetheless distills and essentializes bare-bones abstractions into a rivetingly theatrical two-hander whose bare-bones drama radiates with astronomical implications. By separating the characters from the rest of the world, by reducing the film, Eggers expands its reach, suggesting the world in its absence. The two characters frame a series of potentially fundamental binaries with implications far beyond the screen, binaries that The Lighthouse tests and tarries with before ultimately tarnishing.

Early on, Winslow is passive and suggestible, contorted by the world around him, while the elder Wake is domineering and speaks in implicatory riddles. Yet a deeply sexual ambiguity abounds, and not only because of the cut lighthouse-erection pairing whose omission can’t disguise the charged relationship the characters share and the erotic forces that repeatedly penetrate their psyches. Winslow is equally repulsed by and transfixed with Wake, whose magnetic force is both undeniable and prismatic, implying alternately boss, father, and lover as channeled through Dafoe’s simply magisterial gravel-pit of a voice and shuffle of a gait. As demonstrated in a wonderful scene where Wake is emotionally beside himself over whether Winslow enjoys Wake’s food – not like a coworker worried about his competence but like a lover who believes Winslow genuinely doesn’t notice him – the binaries the film establishes are deeply porous. These are men whose steely facades offer little resolve against the multitude forces threatening to disrupt them at every turn.     

One variety of filmmaker might reveal this porousness, might eat away at the limits of our composure, might suggest the fragility of any solid countenance by, paradoxically, exerting a totalitarian control over the frame, potentially congesting the viewer’s capacity for self-reflection and critical engagement. (Stanley Kubrick’s magisterial beauty as a filmmaker works because he risks precisely this, as does Hitchcock’s). Eggers conversely prompts us to open our senses to that which his film has little control over, constantly reminding us of the presence of externalities, intimating that which exists just outside the frame, just beyond our capacity to perceive it. Like any good Lovecraft adaptation, The Lighthouse etches away reality’s facade, slowly scraping at the scabs of the mundane, revealing – reveling in – emanations from the unknown.

If, then, the film mocks the impulse toward transcendence, it also understands that aspiration as the very anima of a particular kind of life that particular kinds of men want to live. “What Protean forms swim up from men’s mind, and melt in hot Promethean plunder” Wake remarks at one point, and Eggers finally offers both men an orgiastic display of liquid, Dionysian possibility and madness that approaches a Promethean crescendo when one character climbs to the top of the lighthouse in search of communion with a light. The film understands the light either as a sublime gift of the gods or a technological delusion, and as the film closes, the man has become devoured in the gloom of his own quest, having achieved the very cosmic formlessness he so sought after, but certainly not via the means he hoped.

Score: 9/10