In one drunken, quiet hiatus, Thomas and Ephraim dance in close embrace. It all comes down to a violent battle of wills and flailing limbs. Ephraim kills a gull that harasses and attacks him, a crime among sailors, according to Thomas, because they believe seabirds are the souls of their lost brethren. With its cramped, stained and greasy interiors, keening nor’easter outside, bodily fluids and an occasional summoned up fish-tailed mermaid (Valeriia Karaman) and that flatulence, the film screams for the Smell-O-Vision treatment. At one point, Ephraim tells Thomas he sounds like “a parody.” I’ll say. Thomas likes to take drink with the men’s meals, which he prepares, and later he’ll often break into an old sea shanty. He sounds like he just finished reading “Moby Dick” and “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” (and, according to the credits, New England’s Sarah Orne Jewett) and just can’t shut up about it. Part Ahab (he even has a “stump”), part Popeye, Thomas talks the talk like the saltiest old salt you’ve ever met in film. The island’s cistern is fouled in more ways than one.Īt times, “The Lighthouse” comes off like an - ahem - dry run for Stephen King’s “The Shining” (if not Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket”) with a smaller piece of real estate than the famed Overlook Hotel. The two men are left alone with little to do except their jobs, eat and sleep, find ways to get into trouble and lose their minds. He finds a mermaid figurine in his mattress: primordial porn. The other man, Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson, the screen’s new Batman) is the younger helper, coal hauler and shoveler, mechanic and painter. Only Thomas is allowed to tend to the glass lens, the eye of the cylindrical dragon so to speak. The older man, Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe in full beardo mode), is the senior person in charge and official lighthouse keeper, aka “wickie” because of the job of trimming the light’s wick. The film is haunted by primordial noises: crashing waves, blasting horns, screeching gulls, tinkling urine pots, flatulence, blowing wind. It’s set on a small, rocky island with a lighthouse operated by two men in the 1890s. Shot on black-and-white 35mm film in the squarish 1.19:1 ratio and filmed in Nova Scotia, Robert Eggers’ “The Lighthouse,” his period follow-up to his 2015 indie hit “The Witch,” certainly gives viewers an overload of sensory stimulus.
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