It concerned a family of 17th-century puritans banished to the woods of New England, and it involved possessed children, birds pecking at human flesh, and an unholy bond with a goat.
The Witch was an arthouse horror film, a twisted fairytale with the insidious power of a nightmare. Eggers, who is based in Brooklyn but grew up in rural New Hampshire, is a man possessed of a rare and creepy gothic sensibility. The film is The Lighthouse, the second feature film from the 36-year-old American writer-director Robert Eggers, who made a stir with his debut, The Witch. What we can be sure of from the off: there will be weather. Whatever has thrown these men together in this place - fate, karma, the thirst for adventure, the desire for escape (in the case of the characters, but perhaps the actors, too?) or (in the case of the actors specifically) the need to stretch oneself artistically, or to challenge oneself physically, or the reputation of the director, or a really good script, or all of these things - one senses they are aware already, as they square up to the stinging reality of their circumstances, that they may have got more than they bargained for. Is this a dual portrait - or the portrait of a duel? Here are men who have seen trouble before and will see it again. Lives filled with mean disappointments, festering resentments, blood feuds. These might be the faces of a father and son, or brothers separated by decades: hard, thin, stern faces, built for hard, thin, stern lives. The older man’s features are fixed in a roguish grimace. On first inspection they appear impassive, almost blank. And, oh, the cheekbones! And would you look at all those teeth?īefore anything else - before they are handsome faces, or expressive faces, or famous faces (they are all of those things) - these are photogenic faces.
THE LIGHTHOUSE WILLEM DAFOE SKIN
Theirs are, by any standards, remarkable faces, extreme faces, unyielding as rock yet sculpted with great delicacy, skin stretched tight over jutting bones: sharp noses, strong jaws, deep set eyes. The other, more deeply crevassed, sports a wild beard, out of which pokes a small wooden pipe, like Popeye’s. They are wearing sailors’ caps, greatcoats, and hefting wooden trunks. Now we see the men head-on, a striking dual portrait in high contrast black and white: a double exposure. Then a lighthouse can be made out, blinking in the gloom.
No more than a crag, really: lonely, battered, forbidding. Two figures, shadows in the murk, stand silhouetted on the foredeck, confronting the horizon, their backs to us. Out of a swirling fog emerges the prow of a boat, knifing through a foaming sea.
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