The Lighthouse 4K 2019 Ultra HD 2160p

The 1890s, somewhere off the coast of New England. A young man, Ephraim Winslow, arrives on a remote island to work as the new assistant to the lighthouse keeper, Thomas Wake, a lame, bearded drinker. He treats his subordinate as his personal slave and forbids him to go up to the lighthouse itself and operate the lights. Ephraim is not let go of his own past, so that at first he refuses to drink, and soon all sorts of devilry begins to happen on the rocky island, whether he is imagining it or not.

The Lighthouse 4K Review
Ephraim Winslow, a former lumberjack, arrives on a small island. He spends the next few weeks here helping old Thomas Wake, a former sailor and lighthouse keeper. The seafaring wolf has a hard time with the rookie, either making him scrub the hut's floors ten times or sending him to mop the pipes while he himself takes a nap after a gentle night shift on which he only monitors the lighthouse's light chamber. But everything has its limit.

Straight from the seventeenth century, the Eggers type of hermit hero trapped in the abyss of madness is sent to the nineteenth century. The bonnets and desolate outskirts are replaced by muddy tankards and a distant island with the oppressive buzzing sound of a lighthouse. The era with its trappings (dialects, religious consciousness) may have changed, but the people are not going to change. Like Thomasin and her family, Wake and Winslow are cast into the mystical wilderness for a reason: in both cases, the characters are alone in a struggle with an irrational world (including the inner world) and, trying to comprehend it within the framework of existing dogmas, they are sure to lose.

In The Lighthouse, the image of the forbidden, the otherworldly is perhaps even more important than in The Witch. There, the transition to another, incomprehensible dimension was limited to modest technical refinements like the 1.66:1 format or natural lighting. In Eggers' new film, the environment in which both viewers and characters are immersed is more uncompromising (dapper monochrome, a whimsical 1.19:1 ratio, a constant play with shadows and overloaded sound), already truly reminiscent of surreal purgatory, where protagonists will be in an endless struggle with each other and their sins.

The stylization of German Expressionism is, of course, not chosen for the sake of emphasis. Eggers is referring to a movement whose films, better and scarier than others, told of madness through half-implications and creepy dreams. Another question is how to perceive the other references to film, literature and painting with which Beacon literally swarms (from Coleridge to Poe, from Lang to Tarr). Not surprisingly, the abundance of intertext irritates some critics: it is common to see it as pompous intellectualization, to blame Eggers for wanting to be more important than he is. But it seems that the answer is much simpler: the director glues together this film from heterogeneous pieces of completely different works of fiction, to strongly emphasize the irrationality of life in Beacon. How do you cognize a world that splits into contradictory pieces? How do you survive when there is madness all around, and eighteenth-century thought follows twentieth-century thought right before your eyes? Only to go mad.

This is what Thomas Wake and Ephraim Winslow do throughout the film. The two of them have terrible secrets, skeletons in the closet that they can only tell each other in the evening's alcoholic binge. A confrontation is inevitable. The old man wants to remain king of the mountain, alone with the lighthouse lantern, which, according to Freud's precepts, replaces his wife. How can you not go crazy when your supremacy is once again hampered by another lunkhead (the last lunkhead has already dropped out of the championship race)? Ephraim has just as much trouble: after watching the death of the last angry logging boss who constantly humiliated the frail boy, he couldn't even guess that he would be in the grip of the usurper again (this time, bearded, smelly, and, to top it all, farting). "Beacon" is, of course, open to interpretation and provides a gigantic field for it, but it doesn't seem to have been originally planned as anything more than a story about insane, hateful scoundrels who have one road to hell, to an eternal wander for sins they never admitted to.

"Beacon" is not just a talented stylistic exercise (especially since we know how often in the last two or three years good films have emerged from supposedly ordinary exercises - "Piercing," "Daddy, Die," "Detective with a Bundle on His Head"), but a true cinematic catabasis, a metaphorical descent into the underworld. Questions of detached narrative or the artificiality of Eggers's medium have their place, of course, but in his films the depiction of madness seems always to have been synthetic, unnatural. Yes, and can there be any rapprochement between the viewer and the characters in a film about morally fallen people who, day after day, sing vulgar sea songs, chug liters of alcohol, and masturbate to a mermaid figurine in a barn?