Kritiken

I am partial to German silent cinema, particularly Expressionist films, for their daring stylization. . . . The Lighthouse has the flavor of a German film from the 1920s.

It is a manic dream of a film that, with no real jump scare moments under its belt, still engulfs one in a terrifying embrace, accentuated by Mark Korven’s low strings and foghorn-heavy score.

If filmmaking were a matter of ticking off boxes, this would be nothing less than a masterpiece. As it is, the perfect-attendance award punctiliousness to the affair—the press kit devotes space to the process of finding period-accurate foghorn sounds—renders something more impressive than overpowering.

Eggers has created a story about an age-old struggle, one that is most satisfyingly expressed in this film’s own tussle between genre and its deviations.

Eggers shows that you can renew a genre’s appeals by reviving imagery from a classic period of film history.

To say that The Lighthouse far exceeded the cloud of expectations it came wrapped in is a polite understatement. It’s been almost twenty-four hours since I left the Croisette theatre and the crowd that rose in a standing ovation for Eggers, Dafoe, and Pattinson—and I am yet to recover from all I saw.

No less than his audience, the director understands that a horror movie with sailors stuck in a lighthouse is a potentially silly and cliché proposition, and includes moments of self-reflexive honesty—as when Ephraim himself calls his colleague a parody—to gain the upper hand and lead the spectator further and further down the rabbit hole of suspension of disbelief.

The unusually narrow screen shape lends an appropriately claustrophobic feel to Eggers's tense, often darkly comic two-hander, set entirely on the grounds of a lighthouse somewhere well off the New England mainland in the 1890s.

A film not so much steeped in baroque style as positively marinated in it, Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse emerged on Sunday morning as the most exciting and individual film so far in the entire festival.