‘The Lighthouse’ (2019) : Of Gods and Monstrous Men.

‘’Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. ‘’

(Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851)

The first obvious thing to notice about the movie directed by Robert Eggers with a screenplay by his brother Max Eggers, is that it is utterly and deliberately devoid of colour and has been deliberately shot in monochrome with a 4:3 ratio which creates a feeling of both authenticity in the period being reconstructed and an overwhelming sense of containment and claustrophobia. It is trying and succeeding to take us back in time both technically and temporally.

The time is middle to late 19th century, New England, America and we are within the same geographic region of his previous film ‘The Witch’ but approximately 200 years later. The evil is still here. It is not religious fanaticism taken to extreme lengths or Judeo-Christian eschatology and the fetishistic preoccupation with the Devil. It is the evil that slumbers within men's souls and rises when circumstances become in extremis. That is what preoccupies this movie.