Oh boy. Due to not sleeping well last night (at the time of typing), I decided to watch a film of my own choosing for review. Seeing that the Robert Eggers (The Witch) directed and co-written folk horror The Lighthouse was soon to be leaving Prime Video, I thought I would check it out as have heard people speak highly of it. I feel this is going to be a hard film to review. Experimental and abstract and arthouse at times, this was fantastically made, but I'm not sure it's for me.
In 1890, an old lighthouse keeper (Willem Dafoe - Beetlejuice Beetlejuice) and his new assistant (Robert Pattinson - The Batman) have arrived at the remote island where the lighthouse they are due to work at is located. The keeper tells the young man that he is exclusively going to tend to the light during night shifts during the four weeks they are stationed there. This is seen as strange as it goes against regulations not to split the shifts, but it soon becomes clear that the old man sees the light as something almost religious, and jealously guards the entrance to it. After a terrible storm prevents the boat from the mainland coming to collect them at the end of their allotted time, the two men's sanity slowly erodes over being stranded on the small barren island.
I was enthralled with The Lighthouse from the beginning. The small non-wide screen view, the black and white footage, and the serious acting had me drawn in to this world. The film mainly features just the two characters, this becomes the most fascinating part of the movie as both iconic actors nail their roles, easily able to carry much of the film on their own shoulders. Dafoe as the wonderfully stereotypical sounding former sailor shone throughout. Pattinson was as good in different ways, but neither character was likeable or even intended to be. There became a feeling of all this being part of some metaphor with the increasingly surreal and hallucinogenic images, such as the assistant discovering a mermaid out on the rocks, or the keeper's strange worship of the lighthouse light. This increasingly descent into madness is reflective of the characters who both go very off the rails. The meat of the movie seemed to be the complex relationship they had with each other, almost like a dysfunctional father and son one. Vast chunks of the film felt a bit like a multi-episode Dragonball Z fight, instead of fists, the two adversaries taking it in turns to verbally decimate the other.
From the strong start I had high hopes for this, but the horror I desired never really came. I actually found the first part prior to the breakdown in sanity to be the more enjoyable part. The crazed later scenes ended up going on for so long that they felt a little stretched out past my particular patience. I get it wasn't the point of The Lighthouse, but I wish there had been more of a storyline that reached some sort of conclusion. The mystery of what the deal with the light is, is never revealed, nor more major plot points.
On the flipside of the plot, the actual filmmaking was very impressive. At times this gave me a real vibe of old black and white drama films from the 1950s. This is much more a drama than a horror, but the absurdist characters give plenty of moments to put some humour in, even if that is always tinged with an element of malice. The manic binge drinking scenes were a real delight.
The Lighthouse was obviously a very impressive film, something that the filmmaking and acting combine to make happen. Personally, while it never got anywhere near as terrible as Mother!, this still ended up going on for longer than I desired it to be, the last half hour in particular where it became more abstract. The Lighthouse can currently be streamed on Prime Video, though it is due to leave the service in about a week.
SCORE:
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