History & Film | Weirdly Authentic: The Historical Films of Robert Eggers
WRITTEN BY BETHANY LATHAM
Robert Pattinson & Willem Dafoe in The Lighthouse
“There’s little humanity, and what there is is veiled in transgression, but this is the bold, barnstorming filmmaking of the Lynchs, the Cronenbergs, the Kubricks. Robert Eggers is weird. And he knows it. In fact, he revels in it.” 1
Auteur Robert Eggers, who burst onto the moviemaking scene a decade ago, has had a noticeable impact on the genre of historical film. He’s proved to be “cinema’s premier researcher, capable of evoking a historical period with centuries-old vernaculars, period-accurate tactile details, and a visual schema rooted in the past.”2 His directorial debut, The VVitch, had critics effusing over its originality, some going so far as to call it one of the best historical horror films to date. Its theatrical release grossed $40 million on an infinitesimal (by Hollywood standards) budget of $4 million.3 My initial impression was that this was like nothing I’d seen before, a unique work, offering as close as one could get to a clear-paned window into the past. The plot: in 1630s New England, a fiercely devout Puritan family – father, mother, teenaged Thomasin, her slightly younger brother, a set of fraternal twins, and baby brother – must leave the settlement due to religious dissent. Alone, homesteading on the harsh colonial frontier, they face the prospect of starvation if they cannot make adequate provision. When Thomasin’s infant brother disappears (literally in the blink of an eye as she plays peek-a-boo with him) and the twins mention they’ve been conversing with the family’s goat, forces out of Increase Mather’s worst nightmares close in.
While the plotting contains folklore and the supernatural (the subtitle is “A New England Folktale”), The VVitch still demonstrates what, after four films, has become a hallmark of Eggers’s work – historical verisimilitude. He is obsessive about research, especially of the primary source variety, and in a landscape of “historical” film which delights in revising and “reimagining” the past, Eggers strives instead to precisely recreate it. He doesn’t pander and his characters don’t talk like us, act like us, think like us – they are of their time. And thus, they feel authentic. This is not to say his films are flawless, and their appeal is far from universal. I’ve seen the first three (his last, Nosferatu, just having been released as of this writing) and his detractors make valid points: 1. His films can exhibit problematic pacing. (One critic’s take: “Atmospheric it may be, but … in other key aspects, very, very dull indeed.”4) 2. They can be opaque, ambiguous, anticlimactic in resolution (when they offer one at all). 3. This has led to the ultimate criticism, that Eggers sacrifices substance for style. For this last, I somewhat disagree. Style may come first (atmosphere and tone seem paramount to him), but that doesn’t mean his films lack substance – one simply has to exert effort to engage with it. These are disturbing, strange, and thought-provoking movies, sometimes referential and allegorical. Yet even for those who eschew a puzzle, these films are well worth a watch for their historical world-building alone. From the visuals to the costumes to the feel of each film, Eggers excels in capturing the period in which it is set.
So far, Eggers has focused his flair for historical detail on colonial America (the VVitch), 9th-century Scandinavia (The Northman), 1890s New England (The Lighthouse), and 1830s Europe (Nosferatu). I think I enjoyed The VVitch most, with The Northman a close second, but perhaps we’ll take a look at The Lighthouse, since it’s the most visually arresting, and Eggers’s most polarizing when it comes to audience reception. It’s also the one Eggers himself would choose: “If I had to watch one of my movies, which I would prefer not to do.”5
From the first frame of The Lighthouse, one is struck by how very different this film looks. Shot in high-contrast black and white at a 1.19:1 ratio called Movietone (almost square, rather than theatrical widescreen), it mimics the visual record of the time period – Movietone had its day during the transition between silent film and talkies.6 Eggers and the movie’s cinematographer, Jarin Blaschke, utilized camera lenses from the turn of the last century. It’s not explicit in the film exactly what the time period or precise location is – late 1800s and New England from context clues in clothing and dialogue; given the accents and vernacular employed for this dialogue, perhaps somewhere off the Maine coast. The film shoot, a grueling affair, was conducted on Cape Forchu in Nova Scotia, where Eggers had a working lighthouse constructed for filming. The apect ratio makes the most of the lighthouse’s structure – everything looks taller and thinner when shot this way, the focus always on the vertical, the camera often elevatoring up from bottom to top, or looking straight down from God’s eye view.
There are elements of a historical event, the Smalls Lighthouse tragedy (a fascinating real-life horror tale), but Eggers has roamed far afield from source, describing the film as “Waiting for Godot in a lighthouse.”7 In the 1890s, two men arrive on an island to take their 4-week turn as lighthouse keepers. The film opens with a dense fog, which eventually resolves to a ship’s prow slicing through the waves, and a view of the lighthouse framed between the shoulders of two men standing on deck. Once upon shore, they trek their belongings up the rocky slope, passing without a word the keepers they’ve relieved, who are on their way back to the boat and off the isolated island. The viewer is given the first glimpse of these new keepers’ faces as they’re looking, seemingly, directly into the camera – the effect is nigh on indistinguishable from a photograph of the era. The elder seems pleased, and it is he who turns and heads blithely inside while the younger, looking unhappy and perhaps anxious, continues to stare into the camera. What he’s actually looking at is the boat as it disappears from the island, leaving him alone with his companion.
The score could best be described as atonal and dissonant, and there is the constant thrum of the foghorn, which lends a melancholy and increasingly menacing cadence to life on the inhospitable island. Though there’s no dialogue for some time, finally the viewer learns via conversation over an unappetizing meal that the elder man is Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe), taken to lighthouse keeping after a long career at sea. Given the pronunciation, it appears in reading reviews that I wasn’t alone in hearing his name as “Wick,” which seemed some sort of play on “wickies” – his historically-accurate name for lighthouse keepers. Dafoe does a fantastic job with dialogue; I was tempted to turn on subtitles, and there is definitely a Long John Silver vibe here, says I. Eggers draws heavily from the literature, especially surreal and sea: Coleridge, Melville, Stevenson, Lovecraft. Wake speaks equal parts poet and pirate. Eggers stated that he relied on the work of Maine author Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) for the region-specific voice adopted by Wake and his subordinate,8 who introduces himself as Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson). The two main characters are entirely dissimilar, and it quickly becomes clear that neither can be trusted as narrator, with the point of view being primarily Winslow’s.
Wake is in charge, a fact he lords over the greenhorn Winslow. Wake notes that the light is his and his alone, referring to it as “she” and proclaiming he’s “wedded to this here light,” that it’s truer than any wife he’s known, and he’s not unknowledgeable about such things. The light, the sea, and a mermaid make up a feminine triad of power in this movie fraught with sexual frustration on the part of its isolated male duo. Winslow covets working with the light but is relegated to the Sisyphean grunt work – endlessly hauling this and that (coal, kerosene, etc.) in a wheelbarrow in the mud and cold and driving rain. There are overfull chamber pots to be emptied and heavy canisters to be dragged up stairs and lobster pots to be laboriously pulled out of the raging sea, all of these shots framed to reinforce the harshness of the historical environment. Eggers described the shoot as “miserable,” and for a New Hampshire native to say, “There were days when I wanted to die, and I love the cold,”9 belies hyperbole. It’s reflected in the actors’ portrayals. This, like The VVitch before it, is a tale of isolation, loneliness, and hardship. It’s steeped in the lore of the sea: merfolk appear, and Winslow is idiot enough to kill a seabird despite portentous warnings from Wake. All of Eggers’s films have a folkloric aspect. He’s noted, “The idea of a fable or a myth is definitely at the forefront of our process. I start with atmosphere…in story beats and mythological motifs.”10
It all feels pitch-perfect. Eggers is meticulous in his staging, especially when he has photographs or paintings for visual reference. He read keepers’ logs, the lighthouse keeper’s code of conduct manual, and worked all this into the film; he used lists of the stores wickies had available to get the meals, tools, and other details right. He offers insight on those “period-accurate” details and how historicity can make a filmmaker’s job easier: “All of my collaborators are on the same page and we know what we’re after. There’s no discussion of, ‘Would a peak lapel be better? What says more about the character?’ … There are so many choices to be made that it’s nice to have choices being made for you by research.”11 If more filmmakers adopted this approach for period offerings, would we, the viewers, enjoy a more immersive experience in an authentic historical space?
Yet authenticity can also offer excuse for aspects we might prefer not to consider. The Lighthouse has its fair share of … we’ll call it vulgarity. “The Lighthouse is inundated with urination, vomiting, fecal matter in the wind, an intense masturbation scene, monstrous tentacles, and a mermaid’s slimy labia. It’s all rather gross and juvenile at times.”12 The reviewer forgot flatulence – enough to be a character trait and plot point. Argue amongst yourselves about preferences for monochrome cinematography, but there were times where I was sincerely grateful for it; seeing certain things in Technicolor would’ve been unbearable. Be forewarned that there are elements of this film that are viscerally distressing. Things go off the rails as the drink (rum?) flows like water, and by the time the keepers exhaust the supply and begin consuming whatever fuels the lamp (turpentine? kerosene?) cut with honey (?) we know that however bad we thought it might get … it’s gonna get worse. Given the onanism and questionable spirits, it’s a miracle no one goes blind, and this film would make an effective scared-straight PSA to show at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. It may beggar belief, but there is also an undercurrent, thanks primarily to Dafoe, of black comedy. After a terrifying, minutes-long Shakespearean tirade of curses from Wake triggered when Winslow casts aspersions on his culinary ability, Winslow, having been knocked flat on the floor, replies with exhausted understatement, “All right, have it your way – I like your cooking.” Wait: is this trying to be … funny? Apparently.
The list of actors who could succeed in the the kind of movies Eggers makes is a short one. (He gave Anya Taylor-Joy her first film role.) Serious chops are necessary. Both Dafoe and Pattinson approached Eggers after seeing The VVitch, asking to be part of whatever project he next pursued. Dafoe is a natural in his role and in general for the kind of creepy, arthouse sensibility Eggers delights in – no one does slightly (or entirely) unsettling like Dafoe. Pattinson proves that he’s far outgrown his sparkly heartthrob vampire origins. Both he and Dafoe are excellent, there is much scenery chewing and overwrought performance. The melodrama doesn’t feel out of place for the period; rather, it conjures the overstatement of Edwardian theatre tradition. Though, truly, what actions or affect would be off the table for a person sloshed on a quart of turpentine? But the crux, reached well before the film’s midpoint: if the viewer is seeing events from the perspective of such characters, how can we tell what is real and what is madness?
Given Eggers’s love of ambiguity, it’s no spoiler that, in the end, it’s up to the viewer to decide much of this: “It’s important for us to leave the questions open … If we’ve succeeded in our efforts, the ambiguity should be keeping you engaged as an audience.”13 I couldn’t say if the ambiguity kept me engaged, but the adept evocation of the past, the sensory experience of watching an Eggers film and feeling submerged in a historical time and place – that does.
References:
1. Tibbits, Ben. “Interview: Robert Eggers.” Man About Town website. 4 December 2024. https://manabouttown.tv/blogs/words-and-images/interview-robert-eggers.
2. Eggert, Brian. “The Lighthouse.” Deep Focus Review. 27 October 2019. https://www.deepfocusreview.com/reviews/the-lighthouse/
3. Box Office Mojo website. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl947684865/. Accessed 10 January 2025.
4. O’Shea, Keri. “The Lighthouse.” Warped Perspective Reviews. 10 February 2020. https://warped-perspective.com/2020/02/the-lighthouse-2019/
5. Tibbits, ibid.
6. Eggert, ibid.
7. Fear, David. “Drunken Sailors and Movie Stars: Robert Eggers on Making ‘The Lighthouse’.” 25 October 2019. https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/robert-eggers-the-lighthouse-interview-898545/
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Wilkinson, Alissa. “The Witch Director Robert Eggers Spills His Beans about The Lighthouse.” 15 October 2019. https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/10/15/20914097/robert-eggers-lighthouse-interview-witch
11. Ibid.
12. Eggert, ibid.
13. Ibid.
About the contributor: Bethany Latham is a professor, librarian, author, regular book reviewer for various venues, and Managing Editor of Historical Novels Review.
Published in Historical Novels Review | Issue 111 (February 2025)
