The Lighthouse: Boredom Makes Villains Out Of Men

Sometimes, you don’t even need a monster or a ghost or a murderer. This is the domain of the psychological horror film, where everything you need to threaten your characters is contained in their own fragile psyches, their own fears and doubts and uncertainties. Put someone under tremendous strain, and they themselves become monstrous. Add monsters or ghosts to that, and you have yourself a recipe for a potentially better horror film than one that just relies on the supernatural alone.

The Lighthouse is a nightmarish, claustrophobic story about what happens when you put two volatile people together for too long, with just enough mystery around the edges to make it something more.

It’s the late 1800s, and two men have come to a bleak, windswept island to spend a month manning the lighthouse located there. Four weeks on, then relief. The more remote the location, the better the pay. Thomas Wake is the veteran lighthouse keeper, an old salt too lame to go out to the sea he misses so dearly. Ephraim Winslow is the junior man, recently of the timber industry up in Canada. They’re both dour, damaged men, each brought to this island for their own reasons. They’ll spend the next month bunking together and tending the lighthouse. Wake gives the orders to Winslow - tend to the cistern, fix the shingles, clean the machinery, polish the brass, stoke the boiler. It’s a miserable situation - the drinking water is foul, the work back-breaking, and the company unpleasant. Wake regales Winslow with endless stories of his time at sea, farts constantly, and needles him about his refusal to drink.

Wake also spends his shifts in the lamp section of lighthouse, locking the gate behind him, staring for hours into the light.

The film combines the psychological pressure of close quarters in isolation with constant power struggles between two strong-willed men and the mysteries of an unforgiving sea. It’s clear immediately that both men are hiding things from each other - Winslow is evasive about his past and why he’s looking for a new line of work, and what exactly is Wake doing up in the lamp room of the lighthouse every night? Why is he so possessive of it? These are two strong wills in extremely close quarters with nowhere to escape to, so things are bound to get bad, and there are sudden flashes of violence early on - simple disagreements threaten to come to blows, and all of this is before Winslow kills a gull. Wake is deeply superstitious - to kill a gull is the worst kind of bad luck at sea, and his fears appear to be borne out as the pleasant westerly winds they had been enjoying shift to a nor’easter.

And this is where the mysteries of the sea meet the failings of men. Winslow finds himself increasingly prone to visions of mermaids and other scaly tentacled forms, plagued by the flocks of seabirds all over an island now battered by storms, all travel made impossible and timely return unlikely. Wake becomes increasingly unstable, possessive of the lighthouse, insistent on his authority the more erratic Winslow becomes. They can’t go outside, their food is spoiling, and in the absence of water, there’s booze, and in the absence of booze, kerosene.

The whole film expresses this compression and strain. It’s shot in a square aspect ratio using vintage lenses on a 35mm black and white film stock that makes the whole thing look like a moving tintype, and the film is full of bright light sources creating sharp, dark shadows by contrast. It lends the proceedings the same unreal, out-of-time feel as a film like Eraserhead or Careful. If it’s not stark black and white, it’s gray, relentless gray, a landscape made up entirely of wind, rain, damp and cold. The dialogue and accents are period-accurate - for as much as Wake scoffs at Winslow for being “a readin’ man,” Wake himself is prone to soliloquy, perhaps because he is used to the absence of conversation, and so their exchanges are filled with rich, colorful turns of phrase that, over time, disintegrate into inarticulate shouts and grunts and hooting.

This is a film where very little is certain. It’s entirely possible that Wake is gaslighting Winslow, lying about how long they’ve been on the island and convincing Winslow that he’s spent weeks in a fugue state, but it’s also equally possible that both Wake and Winslow, neither of them especially stable to begin with, have both already cracked under the strain. It's also possible that one is entirely the others’ delusion. It’s the late 1800s, and they’re both manly men, and this means that when their burdens- both external and internal - become too much to bear, they have no real way to cope with any of it. All of their confused anger and repressed rage and pent-up desires come erupting out mixed up together in bursts of violence and frenzied depravity. There’s nothing to do on the island but drink and jerk off, so things start getting really weird as Wake’s stories start to change and Winslow starts drinking (and drinking, and drinking) and starts telling stories that sound more like confessions. All they can do is talk, but they have no means by which they can express their feelings, so they can’t communicate, and everything spills over as the sea and all its denizens close in around them.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon