The Lighthouse (2019)

Okay.

I get that The Lighthouse is a novelty. Robert Eggers' artful tale of two men confronting each other shot like a 1920s melodrama with its intense closeups, jerky staging, and blurry B&W cinematography. The Lighthouse embraces extremes, radical characters who act absurdist and fly off the handle, a passionate claustrophobic plot that is begging to explode into violence, and worn on the sleeve symbolism which is desperate to be analyzed. I get that all of this takes a remarkably amount of film making skill. What I don't get is why anyone cares.

The Lighthouse is rather boring. While there are times throughout The Lighthouse where the absurdist moments are funny, and there were times I was just curious to see what they were going to do next, I never got myself to care about the characters or where they would end up. It was like watching an accident, not in the way watching a terrible film is like watching an accident, but in the way that you want to make sure everyone is okay, and if in the end things will work out. But expecting an ending which isn't apocalyptic with a film like this is foolhardy. The Lighthouse's story is destined to be a dark one.

I will give credit to Pattinson and Dafoe for giving remarkably watchable performances amongst all the nightmarish caricature. Both bravely give it their all and imbue their characters with an sincerity which helps sell what is here. But The Lighthouse feels more like form over function, style over substance, an exercise in what the filmmaker could get away with more than an attempt to be a storyteller. There may be something interesting in that. I get that sometimes people want to watch film to see what it can accomplish. But it didn't offer me a great deal. Often The Lighthouse felt more like mimicry or aping than it did about creativity. I rarely (if ever) felt emotion about what I was seeing; I tried engaging it intellectually but could never connect with it in my heart.

Fans of films like Pi and Eraserhead will likely find something of a kindred spirit with this one, but for me this, like those films, is more of an experiment which pays off in the filmmaker's later work. I do think Eggers shows so much promise and after seeing this I would love to see what he could do if he got his hands on a compelling story and became more interested in telling it than it making "a film."

The Lighthouse
Starring: Willem Dafoe, Robert Pattinson
Director: Robert Eggers
Writers: Max Eggers, Robert Eggers