The Lighthouse (2019) ****

In Robert Eggers' sophomore feature, the Poe/Lovecraft-inspired The Lighthouse (2019), the sanity of two wickies (portrayed by Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson) is brought to question when their scheduled four-week contract is extended due to a storm, which may have been brought on by an act of violence perpetrated by one of them.

While I wouldn't say that The Lighthouse offers any surprises or twists, I don't think it needs them. Its primal story (Eggers co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Max) is chock-full of period prose, imaginative insults, and well-timed farts (yes). Dafoe's salty (former) seafarer, Thomas Wake, is perfection, one of those "born to play" roles, and his sinister Poseidon/Neptune-like quality is a force on screen. Pattinson as Ephraim Winslow is quite good as well, forced to endure the verbal and physical punishment doled out via Wake (when he calls Winslow "pretty as a picture” it feels as if he's specifically poking fun at Pattinson's star turn in The Twilight Saga). The scenes more sparsely populated by dialogue—in particular the dark and hallucinatory ones—do more to fuel my cinematic heart, but there are incredibly funny (and absurdly frustrating) moments throughout.

The deliciously dissonant score by Mark Korven ramps the tension and unease—calling to mind the Penderecki pieces used in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) (review) (and there's certainly a visual reference to that film, along with cute nods to Mary Poppins (1964) (review) and The Big Lebowski (1998) (review), as well). But more so than Kubrick, Eggers' filmmaking here reminds one of Ingmar Bergman, Shin'ya Tsukamoto, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Lynch, and Werner Herzog's Nosferatu The Vampyre (1979) (Eggers is reportedly remaking the original 1922 film (review) himself).

The 1.19:1 "Movietone" aspect ratio, used primarily from the mid 1920s – the early 1930s (examples of other films that utilize it include F.W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927) and Fritz Lang's M (1931) (review)), adds a claustrophobic feeling to a film already filled with dread. The high-contrast black and white cinematography is glorious, each scene carefully framed and artfully shot. The attention to period detail shows, as Eggers is a filmmaker that does his research. In the current era of cinema it's refreshing to see a film where the crew obviously put so much care into the technical presentation of a small dramatic film that is almost completely devoid of attention-grabbing special f/x.

The Lighthouse is a strong follow-up to Eggers' excellent first film, The Witch (2015) (review), proving that he's not just a one-trick pony. It's an alcohol-fueled two-person single-location tour-de-force—at times horrific, hilarious, and intentionally fantastical and ambiguous—a prime opportunity to "laugh at misery" (to quote the director) and soak in a superb slice of cinema.