Director: Robert Eggers
Writers: Robert Eggers, Max Eggers
Stars: Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe, Valeriia Karaman
Run time: 1 Hour, 49 Minutes
Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/2TaXgmM
Synopsis
Ephraim Winslow and Thomas Wake are the two new lighthouse keepers. They arrive together wordlessly as the foghorn sounds. It’s a dark and gloomy place, full of fog and black-and-white video. Winslow finds a little mermaid statue stuck inside his mattress.
Wake makes a toast “to four weeks,” and Winslow doesn’t want to drink the alcohol, but does do the toast with water. He spits it out. Wake laughs and tells him the cistern needs to be fixed. Wake wants to deal with the lighthouse light and Winslow can do maintenance around the house; it’s obvious that Wake is in charge.
Wake gets naked that night and stares into the light. Winslow uses the opportunity to go down to the water. He dreams of a mermaid.
The next morning, Winslow fixes the shingles, cleans the cistern, shovels coal, carries oil up the stairs to the light, and does battle with an angry, one-eyed seagull. Wake says he’s being slow and that he needs to pep it up a little. “Boredom makes men villains, lad,” Wake explains. “The only cure is drink,” he laughs. Winslow asks what happened to the man he replaced, and Wake says he went mad. He tells Wake it’s bad luck to kill a seabird, so don’t fight with them any more. Seagulls carry the souls of men who have met their maker.
Wake takes perverse pleasure in lording it over Winslow. Winslow mentions that he used to be a timberman, and Wake asks why he changed to being a lighthouse man. He claims that he is simply in it for the money. That night, he sees a strange creature up in the lighthouse with Wake.
The next morning, he finds a dead gull in the cistern. His nemesis, the one-eyed seagull is there, and Winslow kills it. Winslow’s planning to leave on the tender tomorrow morning. It’s his last night, so he finally drinks with Wake. They argue over Winslow never getting a turn at the light. They drink a lot.
When Winslow wakes up, he sees the mermaid out on the rocks. The tender doesn’t come that day. Wake says they missed the tender weeks ago, and now they need to start rationing food. Where did all the time go? Wake says that once, the tender didn’t come for seven months. Many of Wake’s stories change on the second and third telling. They’re both going a little insane, and Wake calls down a long and detailed, almost Shakespearean curse on Winslow. Winslow finds a head with only one eye in the lobster pot, and he thinks it’s his predecessor. If you were watching closely, the seagull that kept picking at Winslow only had one eye. Was it carrying this man’s soul? Winslow thinks this is the case and that Wake must have murdered him.
Winslow breaks into the office to read Wake’s logbook, but finds that the old man sleeps with it. They both start drinking a lot every night. One night, after the two were dancing, and then fighting, Winslow says his name is really Tom Howard. Howard “spills his beans” explaining that on a log drive, the real Winslow fell into a log jam and Howard didn’t help him. Howard took his identity, and he’s been Winslow ever since.
We hear Wake’s voice haunting Howard: “Why’d ya spill yer beans, Tommy?”
The next day, Howard/Winslow pulls out the lifeboat to head to the mainland and Wake destroys it with an axe. Just a few minutes later, Wake says it was Howard who smashed the boat and chased him with the axe. Oh, and by the way, we’ve run out of alcohol. That night, they start drinking the kerosene, and they get so drunk they barely notice when the sea breaks in the window; that was some storm. Or it was some kerosene.
Howard eventually gets access to the logbook, and he sees how much the old man has put into it that concerns him. It’s bad enough to ruin him. Wake calls him a dog and Howard beats him up. He makes Wake crawl like a dog out to a hole near the lighthouse. Wake continues his masterful cursing of Howard the whole time Howard is burying him alive.
After Wake is buried, Howard heads inside, where Wake attacks him out of nowhere with a pickaxe. Howard kills him quickly with an axe this time. Howard finally gets to go upstairs to see the light. It opens up and he screams at what he sees, then falls all the way down the lighthouse stairs. Somehow, he crawls outside, and the seagulls eat him alive.
Commentary
Both these guys have outrageous accents, and the movie almost, almost needed subtitles. The real star here, however, is the moody, creepy, claustrophobic, black-and-white lighthouse and cinematography.
The setting offers more than enough boredom and isolation to make these two believable go insane. There’s sea monsters and mermaids and murderers, but the true monster here is isolation, paranoia, and alcoholism.