Movie about lighthouse keepers12/23/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() This time around, the horror takes longer to manifest, but the supernatural element in The Lighthouse does eventually develop into something resembling a kind of allegorical fable, not unlike the cinema of Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water). People who saw The Witch will recognise Eggers's eye for gnarly, oddball period detail, not to mention his taste for the bizarre rituals and psychology of remote communities. The full-throttle performances of Dafoe and Pattinson are also compelling, hurtling through unhinged aggression, drunken abandon and desperation.īoth performers, incidentally, talk in a kind of 19th-century seafarer's vernacular that's like something from a children's cartoon, but as the urgency of this increasingly hectic tale builds, the artifice dissolves into what feels like an authentic, forgotten dialect. One is a veteran, the other is completely inexperienced, and this power imbalance lays the foundation for a toxic work relationship from hell - one that becomes more perverse as copious amounts of hard liquor and gruelling work take their toll. He eschews a broader context to focus on the push-pull dynamics of two lighthouse keepers - or wickies. At least this is the idea behind The Lighthouse, a two-handed thriller of homoerotic tensions, violent paranoia and hallucinatory detours starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson.ĭirected by Robert Eggers ( The Witch), it recalls a tradition of bitter male power struggles on screen - from Joseph Losey's The Servant (1963) starring Dirk Bogarde as a scheming butler, to Peter Ustinov's 1962 adaptation of Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor about a sadistic naval officer who bullies a young recruit (Claire Denis's 1999 Foreign Legion film Beau Travail was also inspired by it).Įggers brings the subgenre to the late 1800s and sets it on a weather-beaten, rocky outcrop off the coast of Maine where a solitary lighthouse shoots its rotating beam into the pea-soup fog and sheets of thick rain. Keep two straight men inside a giant phallus long enough and you can expect things to get weird. ![]()
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