The Lighthouse (2019)
Review of The Lighthouse (2019), directed by Robert Eggers
In November 2021, I kind of went on an unhinged Robert Pattinson obsession. I’m not like into celebrities in a creepy way, but I just vibed so hard with Rob’s personality that I was going down a rabbit hole because I feel like him and I have very similar personalities.
He puts on this persona for the public but is just a really awkward and anxious guy, and man do I vibe with that. Anyways, I started this little endeavor with The King and The Devil All the Time, but then I progressed deeper into Good Times and then this movie, which is one of the weirder ones.
The first time I heard about The Lighthouse I was in my sophomore year of college and hanging out with my friend and her roommates.
They were all into films and movies and had moved on from raving about the movie Cold War to The Lighthouse. Naturally, at the time, I refused to watch it because I was on my high horse with movies. I only really watched foreign movies at that time, so this didn’t fit into my agenda back then. But it was free on Amazon Prime Video, so I sat down and watched it during the peak Pattinson obsession. Let’s begin the review.
Two men tasked with watching over a lighthouse slowly go insane.
Robert Pattinson described this movie as him going “Oi oi oi oi oi” and Willem Dafoe going “argh argh argh arghhh,” and, to be quite honest, he’s not wrong at all with this description.
Dafoe is the longtime keeper of the lighthouse; he’s another seaman that has seemingly been disgraced from a life on the sea. Pattinson later accuses him of murder, saying he murdered his old companion at the lighthouse, which Dafoe naturally denies and calls him a madman.
Pattinson isn’t too clean himself—he assumed the identity of a man who died in an accident he could’ve prevented. He comes into the movie with this conscience, which, when they both finally go insane, makes sense as to why he went after Dafoe like that. We often project our own insecurities when we get angry or jealous with someone, so when Pattinson finally snaps, he goes after Dafoe and calls him a murderer.
The movie starts out somewhat innocently. I liked the black and white nature of it because it strips the movie down to its core, one in which we’re not left wondering about the coloring. I began to think about the lack of color as a grey area in these men’s lives; neither one of them truly is an antagonist, although they’d probably call each other antagonists.
They’re just two men who get stuck in a lighthouse, and when the storm comes and traps them in with no food or water, they unfortunately are stuck just slowly going crazy. Pattinson, though, you begin to wonder about even before this point.
Dafoe has to keep telling him that he needs to stop trying the one-eyed seagull because they tend to be the ghosts of dead sailors, which Pattinson listens to until he finally loses it. There’s this long, slightly drawn out scene towards the end when he takes the seagull by the ankle and then just violently smashes it on a rock until it dies. It’s very disturbing, there’s even bloodstains on the rock.
However, I interpreted this action as Pattinson rejecting and killing his past. He took the identity of this man and needs to get over it, so the seagull ends up being the suspected reincarnation of this man. Or, perhaps, he was just imagining killing Dafoe. At this point Pattinson was much more annoying than Dafoe, especially after the disturbing mermaid masturbation scene.
I’m also not sure if I interpreted this correctly, but there were some reverse Oedipus vibes going on between the two of them.
They’re the only two characters in the movie besides the mermaid who randomly shows up wanting sex, and while Dafoe just kind of acts like a gruff, distant father who could be abusive if he had the means to alcohol and drugs, he doesn’t show any kind of attraction.
Pattinson, however, is kind of a spoiled brat in defiance of his father, but then he gets these strange undertones that he likes Dafoe.
I don’t think the movie intended to swing one way or another. The sexual fantasies and homoerotic elements are balanced out with the arrival of the mermaid and the shots of what would be her supernatural vagina (that’s what I thought it was, at the very least). I get that they’re two men who have shitty pasts and are stuck at this lighthouse, but, perhaps, in another universe they would’ve found a platonic or romantic solace in each other.
Overall Thoughts
It’s just a strange movie. I tend to like very artistic films based in art and mythology, but I just couldn’t get into The Lighthouse as much as I tried.
A lot of people I know who try to be pseudo-intellectual try to analyze films like these and pretend they’re smart—that’s the vibe I got from the movie. I’m sure someone out there definitely enjoys this and doesn’t fall into that demographic, but I think my taste tends to skewer more towards films about the feminine experience.
This film leaned way too masculine for my taste and I think that hindered my movie-watching experience. I also hated the plot because I felt like this is a film I walked away with very little to take away and think about. Again, while it’s not my cup of tea, I’m sure it’s someone else’s.
