The Lighthouse (2019)

When did I become a fan of horror movies? I never liked them much growing up, and yet, here we are.

The long and the short of it is I don’t much like gore or jump scares. Give me a good psychological horror story, and I’m all there. Too many horror movies just go for dumb stuff that, ultimately, isn’t all that scary after the initial jump.

As such, I’m really glad director Robert Eggers exists. His 2015 feature debut The Witch showed what a director could do when the only real horror is what may be happening in a character’s head. Of course, The Witch doesn’t stay inside a person’s head, but Eggers does seem to have a knack for what isolation and potential supernatural shenanigans can do to a person’s psyche.

And that brings us to his latest, The Lighthouse.

Set in an unstated year entirely in a lighthouse located on a remote island in the Atlantic Ocean, the plot follows two lighthouse keepers as they set out to man the lamps for four weeks.

Essentially, The Lighthouse is a two-man show. Beyond the two lighthouse keepers, there are a couple of other actors, but none of them have a spoken line of dialogue, so I won’t say anything more about them. Willem Defoe is there as a more seasoned lighthouse keeper. He’s a heavy drinker who seems to push the manual labor off on his younger companion/assistant. Robert Pattison is the new guy to the job, and at least at first he tries to do everything by the book. But Defoe won’t let the young man in to tend the lamp at night despite the fact the pair are supposed to alternate. He never says why.

Now, the characters do have names, but there are some plot elements involved with that, and the movie is working hard to leave the audience feeling disoriented. As such, it’s hard to say what is going on, and that’s on purpose. Most of the movie’s point-of-view is given to Pattinson, and he may not be all that sane even in the beginning. Is everything he’s seeing real? Is Defoe gaslighting the younger man, or is Pattinson hallucinating? Some combination of the two? The movie may not say to the satisfaction to anyone who wants to know for certain.

All of that is deliberate. Shot in stark black-and-white with a small aspect ratio to make the action and characters seem more confined, the one thing that would help most is knowing the passage of time. That, as filmed, is impossible to know except for the handful of times a character outright says so. But when Defoe asks, as he does in the trailer, if Pattinson is even aware how much time has passed, it becomes clear that nobody in the audience should either.

And, quite frankly, I love that sort of stuff. It intensifies the characters’ mutual paranoia and loneliness. They’re stuck out in the middle of nowhere with only themselves for company. It’s their job, but what happens when two such men just don’t really get along? And that’s without the sudden, repetitive noises and a sea gull that seems to really have it in for Pattinson. These two men are outside of all civilization. Who knows what can happen out there?

Grade: A-