“There are nods to the past that an uneducated cinema viewer will perceive as just ‘an old movie’ in its look. Shot in black and white, in grainy 16mm, with a 1.19:1 aspect ratio, The Lighthouse seems to mimic a lost film from a bygone era, but Eggers insists otherwise. “The Lighthouse wasn’t intended to be a phallic companion piece to The Witch,” Eggers tells Dazed, visiting the UK for the London Film Festival. But whereas The Witch was feminine, deeply serious and widescreen, The Lighthouse is unbearably masculine, knowingly ridiculous and squeezed into a square-shaped frame.
With nowhere to go at night, these two opposing energies clash in drunken arguments that unfold like chess matches: will somebody end up dead by morning? Or is it about attempting to penetrate the other’s personal space?Įggers first established himself as a genre extraordinaire with his 2015 debut, The Witch, a supernatural folk horror starring Anya Taylor-Joy. Ephraim Winslow (Pattinson), in contrast, is more unhinged and manic in the script, the apprentice is described as “like a dog that’s been beaten and caged too many times”. Of the two men, Thomas Wake (Dafoe) is the older, dominant figure, yet also a bearded, flatulent pastiche who mutters phrases like “yer fond of me lobster, ain’t ye?” and “yer fastly a true blue wickie in the making, you is”. As the two sexually frustrated guys stare each other down, the very erect, penis-shaped building behind them starts to resemble a thought bubble. In these claustrophobic quarters, the pair fist-fight and bicker non-stop, but do so passionately, with homoerotic tension, hard gazes, and wrestling moves that, if slowed down, could be mistaken for foreplay.
It’s the ultimate “why won’t you fuck already?” movie. In the director’s new film, The Lighthouse, a testosterone-fuelled duo, played by Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, are stranded on the coast of Maine, in 1890, with only a lighthouse and each other for company. Robert Eggers has a saying: nothing good happens when two men are trapped inside a giant phallus.
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