In the Flesh: The Lighthouse

The Witch, director Robert Eggers' debut film, took the time to depict something complex and beautiful before slowly prizing it open and wolfing down its innards. His sophomore followup, The Lighthouse, takes a different approach, drilling through layers of masculine anger and repression to expose flashes of delicate, crystalline beauty to the naked air. The film's protagonists are cloaked in lies and held apart by rank, by work, by social custom, and by sexual tension. It is in their coming together -- made possible only by the breakdown of their personalities by alcohol and isolation -- that disaster begins to seep into the film. 

The film's images of crisis -- a seagull beaten into bloody, limp-winged mush, the slick and fluttering lips of a mermaid's floral vulva, the liquid golden shimmer of the signal light's nested lenses -- are hypnotic. Its soundscape reinforces this, layering rhythmic Foley work over the stentorian roar of the titular lighthouse's signal horn. A furnace thumping. A clock ticking. A boat's engine chugging with relentless uniformity. It's fitting that so much of the movie is taken up by the work of keeping the station running, Robert Pattinson's Ephraim Winslow re-shingling roofs, shoveling coal, emptying chamber pots, and laboriously painting the signal tower. The sense of monotony builds, swells, and finally bursts.

Eggers' decision to shoot on 32mm in black and white is richly rewarding. The island in Nova Scotia on which the film is set looks like the cracked-open and fossilized carcass of some great leviathan, clawing stones like a titan rib cage rising from its scrubby foundations. The house and the light cling to it, frail and foolhardly. The lighting is jaw-dropping. From a near-silent scene in which Winslow dreams of walking into the ocean, black as oil and feathered with the billion tiny indentations of the wind, to scenes at the dinner table where the light of an oil lamp makes Willem Dafoe's Tom Wake look carved from salt-eaten driftwood, no object in the film is lit without careful thought.

That in drunken slow-dancing and a bar of pallid light falling across the cleft of a sleeping man's ass The Lighthouse finds moments of ineffable tenderness says a great deal for Pattinson and Dafoe, both of whom deliver nuanced performances. Dafoe's alternate authoritarian hectoring and cringing vulnerability recalls John Claggart, the frustated, spiteful master-at-arms of the HMS Bellipotent of Melville's Billy Budd. Pattinson's Winslow is more strident, less able to conceal his instability and lack of self-assurance, and the occasional emergence of a Bill the Butcher-esque New York accent is resonant with hoarse, self-righteous menace. This is not something to miss.