It's 1890 and two men arrive at a remote lighthouse on a tiny North Atlantic island to man it for a month. One is a grizzled veteran (Willem Dafoe) and the other (Robert Pattinson) is to serve as his apprentice. This soon proves to mean that the former puts the latter through one arduous chore after another, while denying him access to the light itself. The quality of their relationship takes on the pattern of a degrading sine wave, as spells of warming are followed by ever more aggressive confrontations. At first, it feels at moments like Steptoe and Son seen through an Edgar Allan Poe Gothic horror filter, but the reassurance such a comparison might provide fades away under a bombardment of complex and profoundly disturbing symbols and allusions.
It leaps without resolution from one unsettling scene to another in the manner of The Shining, cuts suddenly into nightmarishly expressionistically-shot close-ups at moments of heightened tension and becomes increasingly hallucinatory, with Pattinson seeing a live mermaid after finding a figurine of one in his bed, masturbating furiously over the image. Semen, the merciless sea, oil, undrinkable drinking water, alcohol and finally blood: liquids dominate the symbolism throughout, akin to the mediaeval humours. Visual symbols, such as the obvious phallicism of the lighthouse, are presented in an insistent, explicit fashion, akin to what you might find in the films of Béla Tarr, through a Hitchcock filter. And as the dynamic between the two characters starts to veer from alcoholic set-tos in the fashion of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (with accompanying homoerotic undertones) through Godot-esque deconstructed dialogue to something more terminal, Dafoe takes on a persona that is closer and closer to that of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, with a glint in his eye, first spinning tales of disaster at sea and then prophesying doom. We know doom cannot be averted, as in truth we've known from the start, but when it comes, its manner is still startling, Greek myth merging with 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The actors suffer more for their art before our eyes than can be faked in any way, therefore adding to the impact, and when this is married to artful editing and a true understanding of the purpose of shooting in black and white as opposed to just using it to invoke period, for example, the resulting brew is a heady one.
Only afterwards did I find out that it did actually take an unfinished Edgar Allan Poe story as its starting point, which makes perfect sense and serves neatly to inform the viewer in advance too of what to expect. Just not the sheer, excoriating impact of what follows.
8/10
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