The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019)

I'd been hoping to catch this in the London Film Festival but couldn't, so very pleased to use the opportunity of a brief trip to New York to do so before its general release in the UK. And I'm very glad I did because it's tremendous fun. The Lighthouse is basically a black and white sea shanty horror - none of its individual elements are exactly unprecedented (plenty of Rime of the Ancient Mariner stuff going on, for example), but it combines them with enormous verve and plenty of visual, sonic, and performative invention. The film needs to negotiate quite a lot of delicate tightropes, which it does with great deftness - the comedy, for example, never becomes too knowing, though it does dabble in self-reference (Pattinson calls Defoe's old sea dog character a "parody" at one point), nor is the horror ever thrust in cheaply when the humour has led us to let our guard down. Though his character is in a sense the simpler and more familiar one, Defoe is tremendous here, and seems to be enjoying himself enormously (at points I couldn't help thinking of Tom Baker's sea captain from Blackadder - which was in no way to The Lighthouse's detriment). Pattinson is harder to pin down, and his accent seems to float around a bit (at one point I thought he was channelling Daniel Day-Lewis's Daniel Plainview from There Will Be Blood), but I suspect this may perhaps be, as they say, "the point". What was particularly refreshing - and one of a number of things that connects this film to Eggers' debut, The Witch, though otherwise the textures of the two films are very different - was the relish it takes in language. (It was no surprise to see a note at the end to say that the film hewed closely to various nineteenth-century sources.) There are plenty of dialogue-free sequences, and much of the film is a more purely visual and sonic experience, but it was great to see it avoid the cliché that film is a "visual medium" (yawn) and so doesn't really have space for the spoken word... here the words aren't just necessary evils for conveying plot and character; the film relishes language as language, with words at points very satisfyingly bursting to the surface (as in one particularly splendid Dafoe rant) or scrabbling gutturally around in the muck. Very much looking forward to seeing this again when it does open in the UK. (The Angelika Film Center, where I saw it, gets good marks for its sound system - levels very well-judged and balanced - but only a B, at best, for picture: the aisle was right in the centre and cast far too much light on the screen, and the projectionist didn't bother to bring in the curtains to frame the old-school [1.19-1] aspect ratio; when so much of a film is about drawing you into the darkness, it really matters if there's not enough of it surrounding the frame.)

PS The connections may be rather superficial - black and white; something of a silent film visual aesthetic; nautical themes - but I'd love to see a double bill of Mark Jenkins' Bait and The Lighthouse. Perhaps a project for one of those immersive cinema-type things... any cinema screens on fishing boats or in lighthouses anywhere?