Movie Reaction: The Lighthouse

Formula: The Light Between Oceans ^ The Witch

Yep. This is a Robert Eggers film. It only took two movies to find a pattern. His first movie was The Witch: a period movie about people in a remote location that starts to play with their sanity. The characters speak in thick, accurate dialects. While the movie is simply categorized as horror, it's better described as a moody, haunted fable. This is all true of The Lighthouse too except even more so. Instead of an isolated family, it's just two men. Rather than a forest outside of time, it's an inaccessible lighthouse. Instead of witches, it's mermaids and sea creatures. Rather than a cursed goat, there's cursed gulls. The moody atmosphere is dialed up even further by shooting the movie in black and white with the square frame of an early silent film. So, the very short assessment of this movie is, if you found The Witch off putting, then stay far away from The Lighthouse.

The Lighthouse is very much about mood. The plot is thin to the point of being forgettable. Two men take a job running a remote lighthouse for a month. Willem Dafoe plays the supervisor. Robert Pattinson takes a contracting job as the wickie (i.e the guy who does all the work). In their isolation, Pattinson starts losing it. The gulls bother him. Dafoe is a taskmaster. There's visions of mermaids and other sea creatures. Probably worst of all, Pattinson is an alcoholic who falls off the wagon while he's there.

The movie successfully rots away at you. The square picture ratio and black-and-white cinematography gives it the feel of an old silent movie that you are trapped in. And, even though it has sound, it's shot in physically exaggerated ways like there isn't sound. The fact that half the time, I could barely understand what Dafoe or Pattinson were saying added to my unease. The crudeness of Dafoe added to my annoyance. I must say, I love Richard Eggers' approach to horror. Instead of going for scares, the movie is more like a scab that keeps getting picked at. It's odd and uncomfortable and unsettling. It stops even being about whether or not Pattinson has gone insane. He has gone insane, but is he also in an insane world?

Pattinson and Dafoe are great at what they are doing. Dafoe is scummy. Pattinson is a raw nerve. They chafe against each other the entire time, but I was never sure if a scene was going to end with a hug or a punch to the face.

I respect what the movie is doing more than I liked it. The amount of - well - everything, overwhelmed me by the end. The mood, as expertly calibrated as it is, is just a hair too unhinged for my taste. The thick dialect crossed a line where it was more impenetrable that mood-setting. I love that Eggers spent his Witch capital on something so weird and specific, but I wouldn't mind if he welcomed a general audience back a little more with his next project.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend