Trailer
Plot summary
Thomas Wake keeps the light on a remote island off the New England coast, and Ephraim Winslow has come to serve four weeks beside him as a wickie. Winslow digs into a hole in his cot and finds a small mermaid figurine, which he keeps inside his jacket. Wake assigns the heaviest jobs, hauling kerosene up the tower, tending the machinery and emptying the chamber pots, and bars the younger man from the lantern room. Each night Wake climbs to the light and undresses before it. A one-eyed gull harasses Winslow, and Wake warns him that gulls carry the souls of dead sailors. At dinner the two trade stories: Wake's previous keeper lost his sanity, and Winslow describes a timberman's life in Maine and Canada and a wish for another trade.
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Cast
- Shaun Clarkeas Departing Wickie
- Preston Hudsonas Tender Mate
- Jeff Crutsas Tender Mate
- Jeffrey Crutsas Tender Mate (as Jeff Cruts)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Lighthouse (2019)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The Lighthouse's underlying story of identity came from a nineteenth-century legend of an accident at Smalls Lighthouse in Wales, where two trapped wickies were both named Thomas and one died in the storm.
- Robert Eggers wrote a scene with a lighthouse moving like an erect penis match-cut to an actual erect penis belonging to Howard, but the financiers had it removed; a body double of Pattinson filmed it.
- Unable to find a real lighthouse to suit the production, the filmmakers built a 70-foot makeshift lighthouse on Cape Forchu in Leif Erikson Park, Yarmouth County, Nova Scotia, fitted with a replica third-order Fresnel lens made by Artworks Florida.
- Eggers planned to shoot in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio but switched to 1.19:1, a format used only fleetingly when cinema moved to sound, after Blaschke suggested it as a joke; they found it better conveyed the lighthouse's verticality and the characters' isolation and confinement.
- Anya Taylor-Joy pursued Robert Eggers offering to play the mermaid in The Lighthouse, but Eggers opposed the casting.
- Composer Korven's score was recorded using a cello, double bass, brass, percussion, woodwinds, a harmonica and mallets that produced friction noises when rubbed on rough surfaces, plus a homemade acoustic device built by a luthier at his request.
- Interior night scenes were lit by a single lantern holding 500- and 800-watt halogen bulbs, and the light was so bright that some camera crew wore sunglasses on set.
