88 THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019
Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson star in Robert Eggers’s film.
THE CURRENT CINEMA
IN EXTREMIS
“The Lighthouse” and “Jojo Rabbit.”
BY ANTHONY LANE
ILLUSTRATION BY BILL BRAGG
C
alling all fans of Virginia Woolf. If
you go to see “The Lighthouse”
under the impression that it’s based on
“To the Lighthouse,” prepare for a nasty
shock. Nobody in the novel, unless my
memory deceives me, gets to make out
with a mermaid. Or a mattress. Nor do
any of Woolf ’s characters strip bare and
stand next to the lamp in the lighthouse,
arms spread wide, bathing in the rays
as if worshipping a luminescent god.
The film, however, is crammed with
such oddities, and more.
The director is Robert Eggers, whose
previous work, “The Witch” (2016), re-
created the rustic pieties of New En-
gland, in the early sixteen-hundreds.
Travel coastward, jump two and a half
centuries or so, sail into the fog, and
you’ll soon make landfall in “The Light-
house.” The setting is a small island—
scarcely more than a rock—off the coast
of Maine, to which, as the action begins,
two men, Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe)
and Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattin-
son), draw near. A foghorn groans. Their
task is to relieve the current occupants
of the island, remain there as the sole
inhabitants for four weeks, and keep the
place in working order. Ephraim, younger
and less weathered, will perform the
lowlier chores, like scrubbing the floors
and emptying the waste into the waves.
Thomas has a higher calling. “I tend the
light,” he declares. “The light is mine.”
The film is largely a two-hander,
with brief incursions from the animal
kingdom, and from brutish dreams.
There’s an excellent performance from
a one-eyed seagull, who presumably
went to drama school with Black Phil-
lip, the fiendish goat in “The Witch.”
But Dafoe and Pattinson have the stage
pretty much to themselves, and the
result is a beguiling crunch of styles.
Dafoe is gnarled, unabashed, and as
voluble as a revivalist preacher, though
his gospel is that of the sea; you have
to go back to Melville—who is name-
checked in the end credits—to find
monologues so salted with madness,
swaying between aria and rant. (“Spar-
kle like a sperm whale’s pecker” is a
typical turn of phrase.) Pattinson, by
contrast, is glowering and guarded. “I
ain’t much for talkin’,” Ephraim says,
like a cowboy at the back of a saloon.
The movie is shot in black-and-
white, in a format close to square. There
is no loose space, for errant details, in
the fringes of the frame. Images are cen-
tripetal, sucking all the energy into the
heart of the screen as if into a whirl-
pool. Thus, we are met by a single star-
ing eye, wide with alarm; by a living
bird being thrashed against concrete,
until it’s no more than feathery rags of
flesh; by a human head in a lobster pot;
and by the hapless Ephraim, wheeling
a barrow of coals toward us, in foul rain.
As he lurches and spills his cargo, we
realize how impossible it is, on this ac-
cursed isle, to hold fast. Your temper,
your self-control, your mind, your life:
anything can be lost.
From where does “The Lighthouse”
spring? In terms of climate, if not on the
map, we’re a long way from the sunlit
lighthouse at Cape Elizabeth, Maine,
that was repeatedly painted by Edward
Hopper in the nineteen-twenties. No-
tice, however, how often Hopper shuts
out the ocean from view, preferring the
loneliness of the man-made structures,
and how, in the finest picture, “Light-
house Hill,” blocks of shadow all but
overwhelm the day. Then, there is Ing-
mar Bergman, and the Swedish island
of Fårö that he came to regard as home.
The first feature that he made there,
“Through a Glass Darkly” (1961), creeps
into Eggers’s movie in its shape, its tonal
spectrum, and its fixation on delirium
and neurosis. What “The Lighthouse”
most resembles, though, in its severity
and its starkness, is a silent French rar-
ity, Jean Grémillon’s “The Lighthouse
Keepers.” Made more than ninety years
ago, it’s all about—you guessed it—an
old man and his junior, who assume
their duties at a lighthouse. Up and
down the spiral staircase of the tower,
the new film follows in the winding
footsteps of the old.
What fans of “The Witch” will want
to know is: How much sleep can we
hope to lose after watching “The Light-
house”? The first half, I reckon, is well
up to the mark, with Eggers hellbent
on his mission to astound. It’s when the
two protagonists begin to drink together,
do battle, and even slow-dance that the
story tilts and sways. Dafoe remains in
his element, and there’s a startling mo-
ment in which he is shown, or imagined,
