Into the Mouthy Madness | The Lighthouse (2019) Movie Review
Bad luck to kill a seabird! 🕊️
I LiveSkeet film reviews over on BlueSky, and then piece them together with commentary to make my full reviews here on Medium before they go to Letterbox’d. Please subscribe anywhere/everywhere you can for more of my shenanigans…
I may never hear a seagull’s cry the same way.
I live in Seattle, Washington, near Puget Sound, so I am persistently in range of seagull cries, and they’ve started to sound portentous and ominous since I saw Robert Eggers’ 2019 film, The Lighthouse.
Wikipedia says, “…the film has defied categorization in media, and interpretations of it range among horror film, psychological thriller, or character study, among others.”
No kidding.
Let me say clearly and indisputably: The Lighthouse is like no other film I’ve ever seen.
To answer my own rhetorical question, this both is and isn’t original IP. The idea originated with an unfinished story by Edgar Allen Poe (the sense of isolation and claustrophobia are very Poe, but also entirely fresh and new), and picked up steam when Max Eggers read a real-life account of an incident at Smalls Lighthouse in Wales, in which one of two men — both named Thomas — died while tending to the lighthouse throughout a months-long storm.
Despite the various Poe or IRL-based inputs, the script and story and execution feel radically original. To some extent, all literature and art is derivative, but with some art, you don’t feel the derivation as much. It feels exciting, new and fresh, like a step forward into something different.
That’s The Lighthouse. I defy you to watch this movie and find a parallel or comparable film.
‘Arresting’ is the word I kept returning to. This script, this cinematography — this whole film is arresting.
I was resistant to the black and white of it all for a while (nearly six years, I guess, though I’ve been meaning to watch it the whole time), but having seen the film, I don’t know that it would work otherwise.
Ditto the aspect ratio, which — even if you’re not a techie sort — you will almost certainly notice. Most films and television provided to us are presented onscreen as 16:9 (a 1.78:1 aspect ratio). However, films are shot in all kinds of aspect ratios, then often post-converted to what we see using the letterbox convention. It’s why movies often have black bars, usually at the top and bottom.
However, The Lighthouse was shot in a 1.19:1 aspect ratio, close enough to square to fool the eye, and the feeling it gives is one of claustrophobia, with an inherently vertical bias. Our eyes are used to scanning side to side along a lengthy projected film print, and with no space on the left or right to scan, we tend to look up, towards the top of the frame, more.
Certainly works for a movie centered around a lighthouse. I’m hardly the only one who thinks so — Jarin Blaschke, the film’s credited cinematographer, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography, losing to a film I cannot recall even hearing of, 1917, from Sam Mendes; I obviously haven’t seen it, but there’s simply no universe in which the cinematography is better or more distinctive or more worthy of celebrating than what Eggers, Eggers and Blaschke have cooked up in The Lighthouse.
In one scene, we see a flock of seagulls to the left of frame as Robert Pattinson’s Ephraim/Thomas wheels a load of supplies in a barrow up a hill, and the gulls are very obviously and visibly prop birds ‘flying’ very impressionistically.
Not only does it not detract from the impact of the film, I’d argue the film’s impact is in no small part due to the bonkers choices made at every turn.
I’m a huge proponent of trying new things, taking big swings. Studios are resistant to any of that, because there’s not really an actuarial table for brand new ideas. If you make a Sonic 4 or another Lion King prequel/sequel, then your bean counters at least have a concrete number to start with (the box-office receipts of the film being pimped to drive interest in the ‘new’ one), which I gather eases their tensions considerably.
I don’t care, of course. If anything, I have a slightly inverse relationship to box-office receipts, in that if it’s big enough, I know it isn’t art, because that many people don’t pay to see art anywhere, much less in cinemas.
I’ve been accused of contrarianism, and the fact that I dispute it doesn’t do anything to help my case, naturally.
The simple fact is, if you strive hard enough, achieve something new and challenging and substantive, you’re going to lose a lot of dumb eyeballs along the way. And you should.
This film is challenging, but it’s challenging like a puzzle or Rubik’s Cube. Unlike those items, I don’t know that The Lighthouse has a solution or answer, but since seeing it yesterday, the moving pieces have been knocking about in my head, and when a seagull screeched right at me as I crossed the street earlier this morning, it sent chills up my spine.
This movie sticks with you. It did with me, anyway.
In the scene in question, I pondered how it would look and feel if the seagulls were more traditionally realistic, less impressionistic, and I’m quite certain it would look and feel worse and less authentic.
Ditto the black-and-white of it all. I’m reminded of one of my favorite films of all time, Pi, the debut film from Darren Aronofsky (interestingly, Pi was the first film in history to be made available through Internet download).
I think to attempt to tell either of those stories using industry-norm, bog-standard conventions (e.g. more than two colors, a 16:9 aspect ratio, etc.) would detract from the impact and artistry.
I did eventually settle on parable or fable for the genre of this film, insomuch as I needed it defined for myself. The story does not lack specificity, which is often the hallmark of fables and parables, but the impressionism and surreality of the film are hard to navigate or interpolate or synthesize without some kind of structure to hang my ideas onto, and I think “fable/parable” does the trick for me.
An amusing side story of this whole production is Robert Pattinson’s (unsuccessful) campaign to get the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to recognize The Lighthouse as a comedic film, making it eligible for the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy, which Once Upon a Time in Hollywood ended up winning. I’d argue The Lighthouse is much closer to a comedy than Once Upon, but The Lighthouse would feel out of place in any category, because it’s too daring and substantive to be neatly placed into a categorical box.
Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson give two of the most gripping, dynamic, incredible, nuances performances I’ve ever seen on any screen. They’re both playing Thomas, or a Thomas. One valid reading of the film is through a Jungian lens, with one man serving as the shadow of the other, or both for the other, shadow in this instance meaning the repressed, unwanted, intrusive thoughts and impulses a human being naturally has. In Jungian tradition, the shadow can be projected onto one’s social environment as cognitive distortions.
No kidding.
There’s a fair amount of that, in this film. But rather than feeling beholden to its Jungian or 19th-century New England artistic roots, the film feels like an outgrowth of this hodgepodge of compelling and interconnected ideas, not the least of which is masculinity and homosexuality (alternatively, androphilia, depending on one’s perspective).
Pattinson in interviews has described how unused takes of some of the scenes ‘felt like foreplay,’ and I’ve got news for him: what’s IN the film often feels like foreplay, or well more than. It’s left (deliberately, I presume) ambiguous, but based on my reading of the film, one of the men sexually penetrates the other at one point in the narrative. And it all is kind of leading up to that point, as well.
There was a scene that the money people freaked out about and managed to scare Eggers away from, or make it not worth his while to fight about it, wherein the titular lighthouse — indisputably phallic imagery; like, that’s the point of it — is filmed sideways and is moving rhythmically which cuts to an erect penis being masturbated.
Like, it doesn’t take a Lit PhD to read homosexuality and masculinity into this film. It’s right there on the screen, and is kind of what the movie is about, to the extent it is about anything (other than two men, who in some ways are all men, and what befalls them and why).
I just took a short break to ponder how to conclude this review, and walked a couple of blocks to clear my head. As I did, I walked past a bank with a seagull perched on its sign. As I approached, the seagull started crying out — to me, AT me, it seemed.
It continued screeching at my back as I passed it, and then abruptly stopped as I took a left and started moving away from the street it was directly facing. I watched it, as it sat there silently, and for all the world, it looked to me like he was following me with his eyes, steadily, purposefully.
There’s madness in this movie.
I say that in the very best, most complimentary way. There’s madness in me. I know that in any objective sense, that bird probably didn’t even take note of my existence. But there’s madness in me that knows it called out something to me that I couldn’t understand, then watched me in silence after it had delivered its indecipherable, portentous message.
Shiver.
Whatever madness this film touched in me predates it, but the film was a brand-new conduit for, or tool to interact with, or plumb to test the depths of, that — for lack of a better word — madness.
Your mileage may vary, but either way, you absolutely must see this film.
