The Lighthouse (2019 film)

The Lighthouse is a 2019 film directed and produced by Robert Eggers, from a screenplay coauthored with his brother Max Eggers. It stars Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe as turmoiled nineteenth-century lighthouse keepers stranded at a remote New England outpost by a violent storm. The film has defied categorization in media, and interpretations of it range among horror film, psychological thriller, or character study, among others.
The idea of The Lighthouse first emerged from Max Eggers's re-envisioning of Edgar Allan Poe's unfinished short story of the same name. Robert Eggers assisted the development when Max was unable to complete his adaptation, sourcing the plot from a nineteenth-century legend of an accident at a Welsh lighthouse. The Lighthouse draws visually from photography of 1890s New England, maritime-themed French cinema from the 1930s, and symbolist art. Principal photography took place in Nova Scotia, Canada, beginning in April 2018 and lasting slightly over a month. It was shot in black-and-white, with a nearly-square 1.19:1 aspect ratio.
The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 19, 2019, and was theatrically released in the United States by A24 on October 18, 2019. It grossed over $18 million, against a $4–11 million budget, and received widespread critical acclaim, with particular praise for the direction, visuals, and performances of Dafoe and Pattinson. Among its numerous accolades, the film was nominated for Best Cinematography at the 92nd Academy Awards and the 73rd British Academy Film Awards.
In the 1890s, Ephraim Winslow begins a four-week stint as a "wickie" (lighthouse keeper) on an isolated island off the coast of New England, under the supervision of former sailor Thomas Wake. In his quarters, Winslow discovers a small scrimshaw of a mermaid and keeps it in his jacket. Wake immediately proves to be very demanding, subjecting Winslow to taxing jobs such as emptying chamber pots, maintaining the machinery, carrying heavy kerosene tanks up the stairs, and painting the lighthouse, while barring Winslow from the lantern room. Winslow observes that, every night after ascending the lighthouse, Wake disrobes before the light. During his stay on the island, Winslow begins to hallucinate sea monsters and logs floating in the sea, and masturbates to the mermaid on the scrimshaw. Winslow is bothered by a one-eyed gull, but Wake warns him against killing it under the superstitious belief that gulls are reincarnated sailors. One evening while dining, Wake reveals to Winslow that his previous wickie died after losing his sanity, while Winslow reveals that he is a former timberman from Maine who was stationed in Canada and is now seeking a new trade.
The day before the scheduled departure, Winslow discovers a dead gull inside the cistern, bloodying the drinking water. He is attacked by the one-eyed gull and brutally bludgeons it to death. The wind drastically changes direction and a fierce storm hits the island. Winslow and Wake spend the night getting drunk, and the storm prevents the lighthouse tender from collecting them the next day. As Winslow empties the chamber pots, he discovers the beached body of a mermaid, which wakes and howls at him. He flees back to the cottage, where Wake informs him the storm has spoiled their rations. Winslow is not worried because he thinks the tender is only a day late, but Wake says that they have already been stranded for weeks. The pair unearth a crate at the lighthouse's base that Winslow assumes contains reserve rations, but it is full of bottles of alcohol.
As the storm continues to rage, Winslow and Wake get drunk every night and alternate between moments of intimacy and hostility. One night, Winslow tries unsuccessfully to steal the lantern room keys from Wake and contemplates murdering him. Winslow later sees the one-eyed head of Wake's previous wickie in a lobster trap. While drunk, Winslow confesses to Wake that his real name is Thomas Howard, and he assumed the identity of Ephraim Winslow, his cruel foreman in Canada whom he deliberately allowed to drown. Howard has a menacing vision of Wake accusing Howard of "spilling [his] beans" and runs to the dory to try to leave the island, but Wake appears and destroys the boat with an axe. After chasing Howard back to their lodgings, Wake claims it was Howard who chased him and hacked up the dory, as Howard was driven mad by his confession.
With no alcohol left, Howard and Wake begin drinking a concoction of turpentine and honey, and that night a giant wave crashes through the wall of their cottage. In the morning, Howard finds Wake's logbook, in which Wake has criticized him as a drunken and incompetent employee and recommended he be sacked without pay. The two men argue, and Howard attacks Wake while hallucinating the mermaid, the real Winslow, and Wake as a Proteus-like figure. Howard beats Wake into submission and takes him to the hole at the base of the lighthouse to bury him alive. Before losing consciousness, Wake describes a "Promethean" punishment that awaits those who look in the lantern, and Howard takes the keys to the lantern room.
Howard goes to get a cigarette, and Wake returns and strikes him with the axe. Howard disarms Wake and murders him before ascending the lighthouse. In the lantern room, the Fresnel lens opens to Howard, who reaches in and violently screams in distortion before falling down the lighthouse steps. Some time later, a barely-alive Howard lies nude on the rocks with a damaged eye as a flock of gulls peck at his exposed organs.
The original idea for The Lighthouse was first articulated at a dinner between director Robert Eggers and his younger brother, Max Eggers. Robert was unhappy with his film industry prospects after the pitching of his first major feature, The Witch (2015), failed to secure funding. Max shared the basic outline of his screenplay, a lighthouse-set ghost tale tentatively titled Burnt Island, based on a reimagining of Edgar Allan Poe's unfinished short story "The Light-House". Adapting the short story proved troublesome, halting Max's progress on the script. Robert started brainstorming ideas for clarity, and, with his brother's support, soon began investigating for source material.
One story that caught the director's attention in his initial research was a nineteenth-century myth of an incident at Smalls Lighthouse in Wales, wherein one of two wickies, both named Thomas, died while trapped at the outpost by a destructive storm. That both men were named Thomas, Robert recalled, compelled him to create a film with an underlying story of identity. Around the time there was a realized concept, Robert temporarily stopped his commitment to The Lighthouse when he found an investor to finance The Witch.
The unexpected success of The Witch elevated Robert's directing profile. To exploit his newfound credibility, he pushed The Lighthouse, among several other projects, in his negotiations with studio executives. He and Max then resumed their work by exchanging and revising drafts. This coincided with more rigorous research of the period to develop the onscreen world, as Robert immersed himself in photos of 1890s New England, 1930s maritime-themed French films, and symbolist art for visual reference.
The Eggers' study of literature with maritime and surrealist themes informed the speech of the characters in The Lighthouse. They looked into the writings of Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H. P. Lovecraft, among others, before coming across the work of Sarah Orne Jewett, a novelist best known for her local color works set around the coast of Maine. Her dialect-heavy writing style provided the cadences of the lead characters in the film, rooted in the experiences of her own sailor characters and real-life farmers, fishermen, and captains she had interviewed. Robert and Max also deferred to a dissertation on Jewett's technique to guide their direction for intense conversational scenes.
Another force shaping The Lighthouse's creative direction was the Eggers' theater background. The two men sourced elements from playwrights that influenced their work as young teens, chiefly artists such as Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Sam Shepard whose writings examine male-centric perspectives of existential crises and psychosis.
The film stars Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, who individually approached Robert Eggers to express their willingness to collaborate. Pattinson originally met Eggers to discuss an offer to portray a Victorian socialite in an unrelated project, but Pattinson passed because he believed the role would fail to challenge his acting ability. His next meeting with Eggers took place once he finished reading The Lighthouse's completed script, and during the conversation Pattinson showed Eggers a clip of an intoxicated man screaming "I am a demon" to convey this understanding of the director's vision.
Eggers's initial film proposals with Dafoe were also not fruitful. Dafoe and Pattinson had met at a party, and Pattinson's participation in The Lighthouse was used as enticement in pitches to Dafoe. When they met in person to discuss the project, Dafoe recalled the director was plainspoken in the conversation: "There was no discussion. 'This is the way we're going to do this. My way or the highway.' That's very unusual, especially for a two-hander, for a director to say, 'This is the way I see it. Yes or no?'"
Details about the film's cast of actors and producers were revealed in the media by February 2018. To prepare for their respective roles, each actor employed different techniques at the rehearsals. Dafoe, citing his theater background with the experimental troupe The Wooster Group, drew from his spontaneous acting style in rehearsals, whereas Pattinson planned his rehearsing from the discussion of the script.
Anya Taylor-Joy, who starred in Eggers's directorial debut The Witch, was eager to work with him again and asked if she could play the mermaid. Eggers replied that there was not a role for her and she "really should not be this particular mermaid". Taylor-Joy then jokingly suggested that she could play a seagull instead.
Because the filmmakers could not find a lighthouse suitable for the needs of the production, they constructed a 70-foot (20-meter) makeshift lighthouse on Cape Forchu in Leif Erikson Park in Yarmouth County, Nova Scotia. Most of the interiors were filmed on sets constructed inside a hangar at Yarmouth Airport and in soundstages near Halifax. Principal photography began on April 9, 2018, and lasted slightly over schedule at 35 days as a result of unforeseen circumstances on set. Problems were attributed to harsh weather, the lighthouse set's remoteness, and the technical demands of the shoot. Additional photography took place in Pinewood and Brooklyn.
Eggers envisioned shooting The Lighthouse in black-and-white, with a boxy aspect ratio, before preparing the script. Longtime collaborator Jarin Blaschke was hired as the film's director of photography in his third project with Eggers. They refused to shoot in color because they feared undermining the artistic integrity of their work, despite facing resistance from studio executives seeking to maximize profits for shareholders. At first, Eggers considered using 1.33:1 aspect ratio as he believed it would sufficiently capture the confined sets and the lighthouse's vertical orientation, but reconsidered when Blaschke suggested shooting in 1.19:1 aspect ratio as a joke, which was used fleetingly during the film industry's transition to sound. After further analysis of period films for inspiration, namely the German thriller M (1931), Blaschke determined that the 1.19:1 format endowed footage with a greater sense of confinement, while amplifying the physical isolation of the characters in their environment. As well, production took inspiration from Man of Aran (1934), Pickpocket (1959), In Cold Blood (1967), Béla Tarr, and Ingmar Bergman for the film's visual hallmarks.
The Lighthouse was shot on 35mm film using Panavision Panaflex Millennium XL2 cameras equipped with vintage Bausch and Lomb Baltar lenses. Occasionally, to capture flashback sequences or scenes of heightened conflict, specialized lenses refurbished by Panavision were used. Filmmakers produced the onscreen universe with a highly saturated visual palette evocative of orthochromatic film. Creating textures with a sufficient antique quality was one of Blaschke's initial responsibilities during the pre-production. He developed a process of testing the utility of digital footage in color negative film stock, first with Kodak Vision3 500T 5219 film, before selecting Eastman Double-X 5222 stock based on the composition produced. Blaschke resumed the testing after securing the Baltar lenses for the shoot, this time with an arrangement of shortpass filters—a class of scientific optical filters—and photographic filters most sensitive to blue-green and ultraviolet light. The specifications were so unusual that it required the manufacture of custom sets of filters by Schneider Kreuznach, which was expensive and time-consuming. Blaschke recalled, "I sketched a desired spectrograph on graph paper, indicating a complete elimination of all light beyond 570 nanometers [mid-yellow] while allowing all shorter wavelengths to pass freely. At that point, I was unsure of the true light loss and I was pretty nervous about it." Post-production editing of The Lighthouse occurred simultaneously at the FotoKem film laboratories in Burbank, California.
The Lighthouse is composer Mark Korven's second film with Eggers. The filmmakers distinguished the score from The Witch with music suggestive of the sounds and mythologies of the sea. They also aimed to convey the reactions of the characters in isolation. The earliest musical approach was inspired by sea shanties and conch music, and the filmmakers created a placeholder temp score from a playlist containing horror movie scores, ancient Greek conch music, and compositions of Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi. Eggers deliberately avoided any string accompaniments until he and the musicians experimented for more dissonant sounds. The Lighthouse's final score was recorded using a cello, double bass, brass, percussion, woodwinds, a harmonica, and mallets that produced friction noises when rubbed on rough surfaces. A key instrument employed was a homemade acoustic device developed by a luthier at Korven's request. Korven found scoring the ending scene the most difficult because the music had to support the scene's emotionally intense tone.
The soundtrack was released by Milan Records digitally on October 18, 2019, followed by the rollout of an LP record by Sacred Bones Records.
The Lighthouse has been described as a horror film by critics such as Manohla Dargis of The New York Times, and as a psychological thriller by critics such as Lee Marshall of Screen Daily. Other critics said it was a film that could not be pigeonholed, with Owen Gleiberman of Variety declaring that "you may feel in your bones that you're watching a supernatural shocker [...] Are we seeing a slice of survival, a horror film, or a study in slow-brewing mutual insanity? How about all of the above?" Michael Phillips of The Chicago Tribune echoed Gleiberman's statements, noting that the film's plot did not operate "as any sort of conventional ghost story, or thriller, or anything".
Eggers himself describes the genre as being akin to "a weird tale". Pattinson stated in GQ that he thinks the film is "100% a comedy" and how when the film was up for awards season, he tried to convince the Hollywood Foreign Press Association that the film should be eligible for a nomination in the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy category.
Eggers said the film's subtext was influenced by Sigmund Freud and he hoped that "it's a movie where both Jung and Freud would be furiously eating their popcorn". Given his simultaneous fear and admiration of the senior lighthouse keeper, the younger keeper displays an Oedipal fixation. Pattinson commented on the father-son dynamic in the film by stating that "I was pretty conscious of how I wanted the relationship to come across. In a lot of ways, he sort of wants a daddy" and that, as the film progresses, his character is increasingly "looking for Willem [Dafoe]'s validation" as both a boss and a father-figure. The film also echoes the Jungian archetype of the shadow, the unknown "dark side" or blind spot of one's personality. Dafoe illustrated that the two keepers are "put in this situation that's like a purgatory and then the little personality, the little sense of self that they've created for themselves starts to get stripped away. You see what their real nature is and that points them into a kind of desperation." Rosie Fletcher of Den of Geek gathered: "The way the pair embody wisdom and foolishness, hedonism and inspiration, honesty and trickery and play with masculine and feminine roles [...] seems to support the idea that one is the shadow of the other on some level and speaks further to Jung's theories."
In the film, the senior lighthouse keeper Thomas warns the younger keeper Ephraim of a maritime superstition that is bad luck to kill a seabird, specifically an Albatross. However, after getting irritated by one, Ephraim kills a seabird and brings on a storm that traps the two men on the island. At the end of the film, Ephraim is seen on the ground with seagulls plucking out his organs. This plot invokes the 1798 poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in which a mariner kills an Albatross and brings disaster to his ship.
The fate of the younger lighthouse keeper also invokes the myth of Prometheus, as, after finally reaching the light and learning what is in it, he falls down the stairs of the lighthouse and his organs are plucked out by seagulls. On the other hand, the older keeper was modeled on Proteus, a "prophecy-telling ocean god who serves Poseidon", as he "makes that uncannily accurate prediction for how Ephraim will die at the end of the movie" and is even seen with tentacles and sea creatures stuck to his body in one of the younger man's hallucinations. Albrecht Dürer's engraving The Sea Monster inspired Wake's appearance, with Eggers saying: "The Proteus figure that is more clearly nautical is somewhat based on a sea monster by Dürer, who carries a tortoise shell shield." Eggers explained the allusions to classical mythology by saying they are present "Partially because Melville goes there and partially because of I'm sure our unhealthy Jungian leanings".
The film primarily depicts two men alone in close quarters on an island and contains explicit depictions of male sexuality and homoeroticism, but, when asked whether the film was "a love story", Robert Eggers replied:
The phallic imagery of the lighthouse is explicit, as Eggers described it in the script as an erect penis, revealing that the film was meant to include "a very juvenile shot of a lighthouse moving like an erect penis and a match-cut to actual erect penis" belonging to Howard, but this sequence was removed at the request of the financiers. A body double of Pattinson was used to film the scene, and when asked about it in an interview, Pattinson said he did not know the shot was of a penis at first, initially assuming it was of the lighthouse.
Sexual fantasy and masturbation are also recurring themes in the film. For Dafoe, the androphilia in the film is blatant, but it is also used to explore what it means to be a man: "They have a sense of guilt, of wrong [...] it's got existential roots [...] about masculinity and domination and submission." After beating the older lighthouse keeper into submission, the younger keeper assumes a dominant role, calling the older man "dog" and dragging him on a leash. Commenting on this scene, Pattinson said "there's definitely a take where we were literally trying to pull each other's pants down. It literally almost looked like foreplay."
The mythological and artistic influences of the film underscore its eroticism. Eggers acknowledged the visual influence of symbolist artists Sascha Schneider and Jean Delville, whose "mythic paintings in a homoerotic style become perfect candidates as imagery that's going to work itself into the script." The composition of a shot in the film was consciously adapted from Schneider's Hypnosis.
The Lighthouse had its world premiere on May 19, 2019, in the Directors' Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival, and it was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Atlantic Film Festival in September. It was distributed by A24 in North America and by Focus Features internationally, and was released in theaters on October 18, 2019.
The Lighthouse was released on digital in the United States on December 20, 2019, and in Blu-ray and DVD formats on January 7, 2020, by Lionsgate Home Entertainment. Later, it was released on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray by A24 on March 28, 2023.
The film grossed $10.9 million in the United States and $7.5 million in other territories, for a worldwide box-office total of $18.3 million.
Its limited opening weekend in the U.S., the film grossed $419,764 from eight theaters, for an average of $52,471 per venue. Its second weekend, the film expanded to 586 theaters and grossed $3.75 million, placing eighth at the box office. The following weekend, the film expanded to 978 theaters, but its gross fell 34.7% to $2 million, and it finished in 13th place.
On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 90% based on 398 reviews, with an average score of 8/10. The site's consensus reads: "A gripping story brilliantly filmed and led by a pair of powerhouse performances, The Lighthouse further establishes Robert Eggers as a filmmaker of exceptional talent." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 83 out of 100 based on 52 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".
Owen Gleiberman of Variety called the film "darkly exciting" and "made with extraordinary skill," commenting that "the movie, building on The Witch, proves that Robert Eggers possesses something more than impeccable genre skill. He has the ability to lock you into the fever of what's happening onscreen." Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph gave the film a perfect score, calling Dafoe's performance "astounding" and comparing Pattinson's to that of Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood, saying, "that's no comparison to make lightly, but everything about The Lighthouse lands with a crash. It's cinema to make your head and soul ring." Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian, in addition to praising the performances of Dafoe and Pattinson, also praised the screenplay, stating that the "script is barnacled with resemblances to Coleridge, Shakespeare, Melville – and there's also some staggeringly cheeky black-comic riffs and gags and the two of them resemble no-one so much as Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H. Corbett: Steptoe and Son in hell." Manohla Dargis of The New York Times praised the character development, production design, acting, and themes, and Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune gave the film three stars out of five, comparing it to The Odd Couple (1968) and The Dumb Waiter (1957), and lauding the cinematography.
Conversely, Sandra Hall of The Sydney Morning Herald said the film's attempts at suspense were not successful, and Simran Hans of The Guardian gave it two stars out of five, saying the performances felt more like an "experiment than conducive to eliciting meaning." Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle said the film was well-made, but "fails to give us the one thing that might have sustained an audience's interest over the course of 109 excruciating minutes: a compelling story." Dana Stevens of Slate concluded her review by stating that "The Lighthouse is at its strongest when it resembles the dark comedy of a Beckett play, complete with earthy scatological humor. [...] But as the mythological references pile up and the forbidden light atop the tower accrues ever more (and ever vaguer) symbolic meaning, the film sometimes seems funny [...] not because of but in spite of the filmmakers' intentions", and that, by the end, she became "impatient" with Eggers' "reliance on atmosphere [...] to take the place of story" and found herself "identifying with the stranded seafarers: I desperately wanted to get out."