The Lighthouse

Grade: B+

The word “chemistry” gets tossed around a lot, by me included, when talking about two actors who work well together. I don’t know how to describe it, but there’s a palpable magic that happens when you pair up the two right people on stage or screen. 1 + 1 = 3. I’d be interested to see if anybody has written an article or a dissertation where they get to the bottom of chemistry once and for all, and explain what it is and how to make it happen.

In the new film The Lighthouse, Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson feed off each other, and elevate one another’s performance. It’s basically a two-person movie. There is a third actor who is barely there, and you should avoid any cast lists online if you can, as seeing this unnamed character’s title will give away a direction the movie takes. But this is pretty much the Dafoe/Pattinson show. They play Thomas Wake and Ephraim Winslow – an old pro and young protege stationed together to take care of a remote lighthouse for 4 weeks on a New England island in 1890. Wake hits the booze pretty hard, limps around, and emits enough flatulence to score a symphony. IMDb helpfully informs us that Dafoe’s farts were added in post-production, in case you were curious. Dafoe has always been one to watch, but has picked particularly interesting projects these days. He got his third Oscar nomination two years ago for The Florida Project, which will go down as one of my favorite films of the decade – and got a Best Actor nod this past year for playing Vincent Van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate. I’d support a third nomination in a row for him, for this. Pattinson, who I’d only ever seen in the Twilight movies, is unrecognizable here. He takes a little while to get cooking, but once he does, he is an absolute force of nature to watch, and he can certainly hold his own with his co-star.

Director Robert Eggers (The Witch) has filmed The Lighthouse in a dreary black-and-white, and what I’d call an Instagram-like aspect ratio. Theater screens are huge rectangles. This is a square. Eggers wants us to feel the claustrophobia. The movie is light on plot, and I didn’t always understand what they were saying or meaning, due to their accents. But what with all their hard labor, miserable weather conditions, isolation, cigarettes, dirty water, booze, sleep deprivation, hallucinations, and farting, we get the feeling they don’t always understand themselves or each other. Things turn weird, ominous, disturbing, and grisly. I am surprised that I have not seen one reviewer mention David Lynch’s Eraserhead, because that, to me, is what The Lighthouse is most akin to. I hope Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson had a hot shower, a nice chicken dinner, and a warm bed waiting for them at the end of each shooting day.

Whatever chemistry is, these two give us a master class on it here.

Grade: B+