Wake is an irrational taskmaster and a roaring drunk, at night retiring up the tower to the light for secret, mysterious activities of which we only see disturbingly sexualized hints and sticky after-effects.
Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson in Robert Eggers' "The Lighthouse." (Courtesy A24) It’s just the two of them assigned to a four-week, bad weather stint inside some awfully tight quarters, and they’re instantly off on the wrong foot when prissy teetotaler Ephraim refuses a toast from his boozy boss. Willem Dafoe is his superior, Thomas Wake, a briny old bastard with a flowing beard who chews on a pipe and speaks in an almost impenetrable sea shanty patois. Robert Pattinson stars as young Ephraim Winslow, a former lumberjack looking for a new line of work, reporting for duty as assistant lighthouse keeper on an uninhabitable hunk of rock somewhere in the North Atlantic. It’s also an absolute riot, the season’s sickest gross-out comedy gussied up in arthouse duds. There are allusions to ancient ocean legends and fabled curses copped from Herman Melville and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but beneath all the mythological bluster it’s really a movie about two guys living too close together and driving each other slowly, spectacularly insane.
It’s a wild, hallucinatory blitzkrieg shot in high-contrast black-and-white with a sound design that’s more like a sensory assault. Facebook Email Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson in Robert Eggers' "The Lighthouse." (Courtesy A24)Ī horror movie about having a roommate, writer-director Robert Eggers’ striking sophomore effort “The Lighthouse” is a visually arresting wallow in ye olde New England dread replete with phantasmagoric glimpses of sea monster tentacles and wounded mermaids washed up on shore.
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