The first reviews of The Lighthouse have been written, but some of the most invested critics will have to wait to catch the Nova Scotia-shot feature film on the big screen.
“I know I want to see it,” said Janice Saulnier, operations manager at Rudder’s Seafood Restaurant and Brew Pub on Water Street in Yarmouth.
“It’ll just be interesting to see if it’s going to look like Yarmouth,” Saulnier said during a phone interview Tuesday.
“I think everybody’s really just waiting for it to come out so we can look at it. I think we’re really hoping it’s going to be in our theatre here.”
The Lighthouse was directed by Robert Eggers and written by him and his brother, Max Eggers. Robert Pattinson, who has transitioned from a heartthrob in the Twilight franchise to edgier fare, and Willem Dafoe, a four-time Oscar nominee, play lighthouse keepers in turn-of-the-last-century Maine. While the plot was largely kept secret ahead of the premiere, the film had been described as a fantasy-horror story set among the world of seafaring myths.
Its first screening was Sunday in France, where the movie had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in the Directors’ Fortnight section. As of Tuesday, the film holds an approval rating of 100 per cent on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 19 reviews with an average rating of nine out of 10.
“That’s awesome to hear,” said Saulnier.
“They’re two great actors, so I think it’s going to be awesome to watch.”
Based on the early notices, The Lighthouse looks set to be something of a critics’ darling. A five-star review in the Guardian in the U.K. is headlined Robert Pattinson shines in sublime maritime nightmare.
“It is explosively scary and captivatingly beautiful in cinematographer Jarin Blaschke’s fierce monochrome, like a daguerreotype of fear,” writes Peter Bradshaw.
“And the performances from Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson have a sledgehammer punch. Pattinson, in particular, just gets better and better.”
Writing in industry bible Variety, Owen Gleiberman said The Lighthouse “is a gripping and turbulent drama that draws on a number of influences” to create its own “art-thriller thing.”
“Suffused with foghorns and epic gusts of wind, as well as a powerfully antiquated sense of myth and legend, the movie is shot in shimmeringly austere black and-white,” said Gleiberman, who noted that the movie is projected on the screen as “a nearly perfect square, like that of an early sound film.”
The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney saw The Lighthouse as a worthy followup to the director’s earlier work.
“After plunging us into the darkest corners of the minds of a family of banished 1630s Puritan Plymouth colonists in his unsettling 2015 debut The Witch, writer-director Robert Eggers confirms his instant reputation as a master of the New England Gothic with this claustrophobic second feature,” Rooney wrote.
“The director, working with his brother Max Eggers as co-screenwriter, has crafted another distinctive hallucinatory tale, this time melding maritime legend with ancient mythology, lumberjack lore, supernatural suggestion, enveloping elemental terror and the roiling paranoia of prolonged isolation.”
While it doesn’t sound like The Lighthouse is going to be a run-of-the-mill tourist promo, the production did have a noticeable effect on the area economy last spring.
Principal photography lasted 32 days, according to IMDB, and took place last year in April and May. It employed a Nova Scotia crew of over 150 people and spent over $6.8 million filming in the province, according to Screen Nova Scotia, including $300,000 on hotel rooms in Yarmouth.
“It was a very positive impact,” Saulnier said.
“I know it brought a lot of production people in, and I know it was great for us. For that time of year, it was our slower season, and it kind of brought everything up.
“We know our locals who always come in, and here we are in April, we’re not used to getting tourists. We had great conversations with a lot of them, and it was a great positive impact for the community, I think.”
A couple of times Dafoe came into the restaurant, which is billed as the social hub of the Yarmouth waterfront.
“Really nice guy, really down to earth,” Saulnier said.
“He was just like a regular guy.”
Filming locations included the Leif Erickson Trail at the Cape Forchu lighthouse in Yarmouth County, where a full-scale temporary lighthouse was built. The production also filmed in Dartmouth at a soundstage and at Survival Systems, a pool facility that allows for realistic marine and underwater scenes.
Saulnier said some locals were disappointed the fake beacon wasn’t a more permanent structure.
“I know when they did the replica of the lighthouse, everybody was kind of hoping it would stay up. But they had to take it down; it was just made out of scaffolding. A lot of people were like, ‘Oh, that’s too bad,’ because nobody really got to see it. We got to see pictures.”
As for when anyone not at Cannes will get to see The Lighthouse, it’s anybody’s guess. A general release date has yet to be announced.
