[8.3/10] A grim portrait of mutual madness. *The Lighthouse* pulls no punches in its devilish descent. Instead, it rubs our noses in the ruddy, bilge-ridden ugliness of it all. Two men, trapped on some godforsaken rock for days or weeks or months, grow bitter and affectionate and vulnerable and insane at once. There’s no respite from their sorry state, no sparing of muck or murder, just two near-feral souls torturing one another in isolation until their sad end finally meets them.
And I liked it.
*The Lighthouse* is challenging at times. It’s a slow movie, one that forces its audience to reckon with the passage of time and sense of inescapability at the same time its characters do. Its two leads speak in mumbles and old-timey slang that make subtitles a must for anyone who can manage them. There’s a maddening ambiguity to which of them is losing his marbles when and whether or not some damning supernatural forces are at work.
But therein also lies the film’s charm, if you can call it that, and certainly its uniqueness. The tale of loose screws while trapped in some remote locale is not a new one. Everything from *The Shining* to *The Simpsons*’ “Mountain of Madness” has played on similar ideas. What distinguishes *The Lighthouse*, though, is the way it crams the viewer into the cramped spaces the two main characters occupy, and with it, the equally cramped confines of their wicked minds.
The film sees sea-battered “wickie” Thomas Wake hire young and hungry Ephraim Winslow to join him as his second in the titular lighthouse. What starts as a rough four-week tour of duty turns into an endless joint imprisonment, as a storm stymies their way off and soaks their rations. Their tempers run short. Their grievances grow large. And their grasp on what’s real and what’s not starts to slip.
That’s all there is. I don’t mean that derisively. The strength of the film is how it feels almost claustrophobic in its single-minded pursuit of these two men’s deteriorating relationship whilst practically marooned together. Willem Dafoe gives a downright volcanic performance as Wake, rambling, coarse, entitled, prone to fantasy, and full of the salty seadog patois that his partner acknowledges as parody and yet feels plausible. Robert Pattinson recalls Bill the Butcher of *Gangs of New York* as Winslow, with a grumbly Nor'easter accent, nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic, and seething resentment and lingering guilt through it all. They *are* the film, and it’s to the film’s benefit.
That said, it’s a cliché to call a setting a character in the story, but hats are off to the production designers and cinematography team. The film’s creatives not only find and construct a structure and a setting that seems to lurch and lilt and respond to the goings on of its occupants, but they shoot it in such a fashion that it feels supernatural, bedeviled, or divine with enough subtlety to toe the line of realism. The spartan, crumbling, yet mechanically intricate environs serve the film’s purpose and mood.
The atmosphere may be the strongest point to recommend *The Lighthouse*. Even before things start unraveling, there’s a mordant, lugubrious tone to these two men marking their time in a wave-beaten shack. The deliberate pace, the mix between long takes and quick cuts, the sense of the entire enterprise as a doomed and haunted one, makes your skin crawl even before things get bloody awful.
Much of that owes to the brilliant cinematography. Like many modern (and classic) pictures in black and white, the lack of color adds greater emphasis to light and shadow. That’s particularly useful in a movie like this one, where the abstract concept of the light, who jealously guards it and who’s denied access, and the figurative fall into darkness of both characters, is so important and at times even made literal. In the same way, how the figures occupy the frame is vital to the sensibility of each scene as a whole. Who’s large and who’s small, who’s high and who’s low, matters both to the composition of a shot and to the slow-simmering tension between Wake and Winslow.
Their power struggle is also given form by the exquisite sound design. The purgatory of the place comes through in the loud foghorns that cut through the storm, the whirs and racket as the structure buckles under the wind, or the ear-piercing static of a laugh or a scream or both at once that defies sanity or sonic certitude. And as mumbly as the two souls at the center of the film can be, they speak in rock-ribbed poetry, often as beautiful and stirring as their itinerant curses are disturbing.
And those curses are hurled with abandon. At heart, *The Lighthouse* is a star-crossed power struggle. Wake must be in command, barking orders and demands at his lieutenant as the one scrap of authority he can cobble together in his sorry existence. Winslow grows in his hatred of being under another man’s bootheel, not free to make his own way for honest work. There’s hints that each has killed other men for failing to accede to or accommodate each’s gut-spilt preferences on this front, making the pair a tragedy waiting to happen.
Only sometimes, it’s a comedy waiting to happen. For such a deliberately ugly film, it can be strangely hilarious. The two get into a thunderous snit over who likes whose cooking. One gripes about the other’s farts. There’s half-winking acknowledgements of the ridiculousness of their situation and personas. Amid all the seriousness of it, sometimes *The Lighthouse* plays Winslow and Wake as the world’s most bizarre and unlikely old married couple, and it works for laughs in an off-kilter sort of way.
But they’re seemingly destined to tear into one another. There’s a worker’s polemic tone to this one. Winslow labors without appreciation. Wake bosses him around as though it’s his right. The sense of miserly callousness and put-upon resentment that roils between them speaks to broader imbalances and injustices. Those incongruities are given life by two people who seem made to hate one another.
So when they’re forced together without end, riddled with unsatisfied lust, unquenched anger, old lives lost amid waves and timber, the psychosis that’s tugged at the corners of both men’s minds comes out in full bloom. In the few moments where *The Lighthouse* becomes impressionsitic -- depicting mythical creatures of the sea, dead compatriots, and quasi-divine providence as the two men sink deeper -- it’s at its maximalist, gut-wrenching peak.
The steady escalation of their violent lunacy, with no escape for them or the viewer, is the thrust of *The Lighthouse*. The film is stark but gritty, fetid yet ornate, a vision of true psychological ugliness and horror rendered with striking cinematic beauty. With nothing more than two mortals extended dark night of the soul, it gives us a glimpse of their inevitable, rough-hewn ends at one another’s hand. As they drive each other mad, a force greater than either comes to wash them away, as each wrests for power and finds none but the brutal release of their empty ends.
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