My Review of The Lighthouse (2019)

 

Written by Robert Eggers And Max Eggers

Directed by Robert Eggers

Thomas Wake (to Winslow): "How long have we been on this rock? Five weeks? Two days? Where are we? Help me to recollect."

Without a doubt, this will go down as one of the strangest movies I've watched. I watched this one with a relative and they were not thrilled with this choice of movie. My feelings are definitely more mixed. It's a stunning movie, but it's also rather all over the place too.

Two men on an island, guiding a lighthouse. One named Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) and the other going by the name of Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson), only later to be revealed really Thomas Howard. They've a job to do and they're stuck with one another and it's largely an endurance test for the latter.

The former of the two, that being Wake seemed to take a bit too much pleasure in constantly undermining Winslow/Howard and getting him to do every dogsbody chore and redid them to the point where Winslow came close many times to losing his temper with Wake's domineering behaviour. As the movie progressed, the tension between both men well and truly reached boiling point.  

Repeatedly getting shitfaced drunk and badly singing cooled their mutual animosity for a bit, only to later intensify it as the two of them preyed on the others insecurities, before trying to  murder one another for good measure. Along with that, there was also the one awkward scene of Winslow having sex with a mermaid (Valeriia Karaman) for the sake of it, but it did make for a rather strange moment in an already strange enough movie.

As for both Thomases, when the alcohol ran out and temper fray even worse, both men actually did snap and came very close to killing the other. In fact, thing even got that much weirder when Wake was made to crawl around and bark like a dog by Winslow before nearly being buried alive by the latter. However it's Winslow's fate that took the more interesting of turns.

Throughout the movie the man was slowly losing his mind, seeing things that weren't there, drinking the worst substitutes for booze and being driven mad by his own past misdeeds as well as the antagonistic relationship he had with Wake. The final scene alone with Winslow certainly a bittersweet and bizarre ending to this off-kilter movie.

- The whole movie was in black and white and Willem Dafoe would later go on to work with Robert Eggers for The Northman (2022).

- No seagulls were really harmed during the making of this movie.

- Robert Eggers talked about both men representing figures in Greek mythology. Wake represented Proteus and Winslow represented Prometheus.

- Chronology: 1890s New England.

The Lighthouse marked a strong but very strange second outing for Robert Eggers. After the success of his debut with The Witch, this movie effectively played out as a two hander between Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson and both men are certainly put through the ringer here. This was something of a very strange but nonetheless fascinating movie.

Rating: 7 out of 10