JUNG AT HEART (THE LIGHTHOUSE)

  

If you were choosing 2020's most intense film, then Robert Eggers' 'The Lighthouse' would win it hands down.

Essentially a two hander for Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, it is a film that intrigues but also batters its audience like a fishing boat stuck in a full force gale.

Packed full of literary, cinematic and psychoanalytical references, it boasts some of the most vivid images committed to screen this year.

But it does all this without ever losing its audience.

Set in the late 19th Century and very loosely inspired by an Edgar Allan Poe story which the author didn't complete before his death, Pattinson's Ephraim Wilson takes a job on an island in New England as a lighthouse keeper under the supervision of Dafoe's Thomas Wake.

It is demanding work, with Wake expecting Wilson to keep all the machinery pumping, to whitewash the exterior of the lighthouse, to empty chamber pots, to gather firewood and to clean.

He lugs heavy kerosene containers up the spiral staircase to the lighthouse tower but is forbidden by Wake from entering.

All of this hard work is done under the beady eye of Wilson who gives him little quarter and is quick to reprimand his younger charge.

At one point, he leaves Wilson to lie on the ground after he falls while whitewashing the lighthouse.

During all this hard slog, Wilson finds a small carving of a mermaid during his work and keeps the figurine in his jacket pocket.

Wake's refusal to allow Wilson to go to the very top of the lighthouse begins to irritate the younger man, who notices every evening his supervisor disrobes while going up to the tower.

That resentment festers with Wake's constant baiting of him at meal times.

However Wilson also starts to have vivid, highly sexualised dreams about a mermaid, played by Valeria Karaman, and other nightmarish visions.

When he eventually starts to bond with Wake during raucous drinking sessions, it also  becomes clear he has demons from his own past that will come back to haunt and overwhelm him.

And as the movie wears on, the behaviour of both but especially Wilson becomes more primal and manic.

Eggers and his brother Max mix a heady brew of folklore and sea shanties, repressed sexual desire and old school horror in a disturbing screenplay that has echoes of Jack Torrance's descent into madness in Stanley Kubrick's 'The Shining'.

It is not the only film that Robert Eggers references.

Jarin Blaschke's outstanding black and white cinematography immediately recls early Ingmar Bergman films like Gunnar Fischer's work on 'The Seventh Seal' or Sven Nykvist's images in 'Through A Glass Darkly'.

There are touches of Alfred Hitchcock's 'Rebecca' and 'The Birds' in there too as well as Fritz Lang who liked his movies to be shot in the same 1.19:1 almost square aspect ratio as Eggers and Blaschke deploy.

The intense relationship between Wilson and Wake also feels very Pinteresque, with William Friedkin's 1968 movie of the playwright's 'The Birthday Party' springing to mind.

But there are elements too of the mania that infects Humphrey Bogart's character Dobbs in John Huston's 1948 adventure film 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre'.

Pattinson also appears to be tapping into the rage of Daniel Plainview in Paul Thomas Anderson's 'There Will Be Blood,' even resembling Daniel Day Lewis in certain shots.

In addition to Harold Pinter and Edgar Allan Poe, there is a heavy strain of Herman Melville and inevitably a good dose of Shakespeare, with parallels to the relationship between Caliban and Prospero in 'The Tempest'.

Josef Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' and inevitably Francis Coppola's 'Apocalypse Now' loom large, with the island feeling like the last outpost on Earth and a place where civilisation just disintegrates and people go feral.

But for all its cinematic and literary influences, the film is also striking for its highly sexualised imagery and themes.

The influence of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud is especially strong - particularly Jung.

The lighthouse is depicted almost as a phallic symbol.

The sexual potency of the mermaid totem and the film's suggestion of Wilson's bisexuality is especially striking.

And the focus on what dreams really say about the individual having them is very much Jung territory.

Above all, though, 'The Lighthouse' is a gothic horror story that is very well made and extremely well told.

Blaschke's images and the work of the 29 strong sound department combines perfectly to create one of the most atmospheric films of the year.

Every creak in the lighthouse, every howl of the wind or squawk of a seagull makes the audience feel like they are living in the pressure cooker environment that Eggers creates.

Dafoe turns in one of his best performance as a lighthouse keeper who revels in his salty sea dog persona.

However Pattinson steals the acting honours as his tormented character loses his grip on sanity.

It is one of the most memorable performances not just of 2019/2020 but of recent years, confirming him as a potent challenger to Joaquin Phoenix and Christian Bale's claim to be the most intense actors working in US cinema today.

As for Eggers, who has recently been working on his Viking tale 'The Northman' in Northern Ireland, a bright career surely beckons?

Having already impressed critics with his 2015 New England supernatural horror film 'The Witch', he confirms his strengths as a visceral, highly intelligent visual storyteller.

Eggers knows exactly when to let the camera do the talking.

And that is why 'The Lighthouse' will fascinate film buffs for many years to come.

('The Lighthouse' opened in UK and Irish cinemas on January 31, 2020 and was made available for streaming and on DVD on June 8, 2020)