London Film Festival, The Lighthouse review: Sinister magnificence as Pattinson and Dafoe snuggle and snarl

Charlotte O'Sullivan7 October 2019

Mind-blowing horror debut The Witch put director Robert Eggers on the map in 2015. Now he’s back with The Lighthouse, another period piece that’s anything but quaint.

In the 1890s, on the coast of New England, horny young Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) has mermaids and octopi on his mind. A new boss, Irish “wickie” Tom Wake (Willem Dafoe) is a crafty, superstitious, hyper-critical alcoholic, with a Gollum-like attitude to the lighthouse beam (he won’t let Ephraim within a sniff of it). Brazenly flatulent, he also delights in taking huge dumps in their chamber pot, giving new meaning to the term captain’s log.

Tom’s a nightmare. Almost immediately, though, we’re given a sense of his vulnerability (a deliberately over-exposed sequence all but invites us to climb inside his frazzled skull). And he’s a fountain of potent phrases. Tom demands that the lighthouse be made to “sparkle like a sperm whale’s pecker!” Thanks both to Eggers and Dafoe’s terrifically nuanced performance, Tom is, in every sense, a keeper.

Pattinson is just as good, if not as well served by the script. In a diatribe, towards the end, his character makes reference to Moby Dick and uses the word “parody”. That monologue (which went down a storm at Cannes) struck me as too knowing, introducing ideas that the film can’t find an original way to explore.

Anti-heroes: Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson star
Eric Chakeen

Meanwhile, the mermaid that inspires so much lust in Ephraim is all wrong. As played by Valeriia Karaman, this object of desire has the full lips of a Vogue model. She’s a 21st-century siren.

The other period details, luckily, are spot on. Succulent black-and-white images capture the sinister magnificence of the lighthouse, every chaos-embracing wave and the faces of our kerosene-swigging anti-heroes, as they alternately snuggle and snarl.

If the result isn’t quite as shocking or profound as The Witch, it will cement Eggers’s reputation as one of cinema’s most outrageous poets. If you’re looking for a wild ride, here it be.

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