THE LIGHTHOUSE is one of the most frustrating viewing experiences I’ve had for a very long time. I’d been looking forward to seeing this movie ever since I’d first heard about it. I’ve loved lighthouses ever since I was a child and a film about lighthouse keepers set in the 19th century and shot in black and white to simulate the photographs of the time sounded almost too good to be true. Alas, at least from my perspective, it was. Director Robert Eggers, who produced and co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Max, was coming off a remarkable first movie called THE WITCH which I truly liked and admired.
Unlike THE WITCH which was inspired by American Folk Tales, THE LIGHTHOUSE is loosely based on an incident that took place at the Smalls Lighthouse off the coast of Wales in 1801 where one lighthouse keeper went insane after the other one died. THE LIGHTHOUSE has incredible production values (they actually built a 70 ft lighthouse off the coast of Nova Scotia), remarkable black and white cinematography using 1930s photographic lenses and two powerhouse performances provided by Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson. With that in mind, this should have been a great movie.
So what went wrong? In two words…the screenplay. For the first 40 minutes, the movie is unsettling in a good way as tension builds between the two keepers (one old, the other young) due to their isolation and the adverse weather conditions. Then suddenly, after the excessively brutal killing of a seagull, the last hour becomes unpleasant, unsavory, and unsatisfactory. Pattinson’s descent into madness serves as the excuse for multiple scenes of physical ugliness that completely turned me off.
Having purchased the DVD, the special features turned out to be a pleasant surprise. The hardships endured by cast and crew and the way the look of the film was achieved was absolutely fascinating and far more interesting than the movie itself. Director Eggars’ commentary references the Smalls Lighthouse tragedy and a 1929 French silent movie called THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPERS which tells a similar story but as viewers won’t know that while watching the film, I recommend viewing the Special Features first.
The Capsule Critic 