Film The Companion Piece to COVID Isolation
So it's four months since the COVID lockdown, and I've had to work from home that entire time. Sometimes I go days without seeing another person. So I can sympathise with the goings on in The Lighthouse, an indie period movie about two lighthouse keepers driven berserk by isolation. I imagine it's only a matter of days before I too start yelling at seagulls and staring into lightbulbs.
It could be the creeping insanity talking, but I liked The Lighthouse a lot. It's not selling you anything especially highbrow or thought provoking, it's more of a mood piece, a character study, and ghost story all rolled into one. It hearkens back to centuries of Romantic literature about cursed seabirds, deadly mermaids and obsessed seadogs. As a concept, I've even seen The Goodies tell a comedy version of the exact same story, 50 years in advance of The lighthouse, and hell I even once drafted a screenplay two-hander about trapped men driven crazy by fog horns. We're not entering unfamiliar waters here, but that's fine, because The Lighthouse is still an engaging, haunting, gruesome, and often quite funny tale, and the half remembered yarns it takes inspiration from add to its appeal.
Then there's the aesthetic. The Lighthouse is shot in black and white, with the unnatural lighting and aspect ratio of an old 40s movie. Rather than feel like a contrivance for the sake of the art school kids, these choices serve the movie. The narrow aspect makes each scene feel more claustrophobic, the stark shadows and glowing eyes more vivid and nightmarish. Willem Dafoe's leering face is a work of art by itself, and you find yourself uncomfortably close to it for much of the movie. There are also quite a lot of clever effects, cleverly camouflaged by the more primitive film style.
I've talked vaguely about the plot, largely because there isn't much, and largely because its supposed to be a mystery. One thing I will talk about is the way it presents an unreliable narrative through its mad characters; I'm pretty sick of "maybe the protagonist is just crazy!" stories, and as a twist they're as boring and cheap as the movie saying, "Maybe it was all a dream!". Having said that, The Lighthouse is the one time I've seen it done right. Though the events of the movie could easily be interpreted as the works of feverish imaginations, it's just as easy - if not more so - to believe that every bit of it happened as we see it, complete with the supernatural elements. The surrealist style certainly makes it feel plausible.
I enjoyed The Lighthouse as the nasty little piece of work it intends to be, for the cost of a rental you should definitely give it a try.
Film Minimalist and dense, horrific and hilarious, artistic and gloriously WTF.
I adored this movie thoroughly about forty minutes into it, and it didn't ever let me down after.
I wasn't initially sure how funny I was meant to find the film. Willem Dafoe is magnetic and sinks into the role of sea-dog Wake, but at the same time, it's impossible to really take him as seriously as the character wants to be, because, well, it's Willem Dafoe doing a heavily-wrought sea-dog character! But the longer the film goes on, the more clear it becomes that it's entirely self-aware about being funny, and man, the film has some great bizarre comedy to it with ridiculous lines and scatological humor that ring authentic in a film where they might objectively seem unfit. A good portion of the film is a period buddy comedy.
The rest of the film is a pretty striking psychosexual horror drama with retro styling and heavy surrealism. The film is shot like a much older movie, and really shrewdly uses black-and-white. For a film about the perils of isolation and temptation in a lighthouse, chiaroscuro is the only way to go, and the cinematography is gorgeous. The story itself is extremely ambiguous, and might be the best psychological horror isolation-insanity story I've seen. Tons of possibilities as to what's happening (or even which pieces of the narrative were true vs. imagined) are brought up. We don't know who to trust or what's real. This could very well be the Poe-like story of mundane insanity in a lighthouse and a man learning his aspirations and breakdown were all leading to a mind-breaking reality check that his psychosis was for nothing. The film could also be entirely hallucinated by a man who isn't even in the film's location. Or it could be a story of the ancient folk beings taking revenge for a transgression. Or the story of a Promethean pursuit against a shapeshifting god in disguise. Or a Lovecraftian scenario of compulsion and madness with no explanation. For a film with only two characters driving the plot, there's many ways to read it, and despite the film being so open-ended, it doesn't feel disjointed or bare as a viewing experience. It's extremely compelling, amusing, disturbing, and funny.
This is a real mind-trip with a lot of symbolic and interpretive depth to it. If you like WTF movies and psychological horror, this is for you.