The hypnotic and hallucinatory tale of two lighthouse keepers on a remote and mysterious New England island in the 1890s.
It isn’t often a film that leaves me speechless but I have no recollection of a movie leaving me speechless because of the fact that it didn’t make sense in the slightest. “The Lighthouse” does just that. It is a film that had so much promise. It had a cast that should have been able to bring any half-baked script up from the depths and at least polish it a little; that did not happen. I have no doubt that Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson gave it their all.
Dafoe plays Thomas Wake, a great elder wickie that is seasoned with stories of the sea and war. He bellows paragraphs angrily without want for air, many times through the film’s 150-minute run time. These moments start out impressively but after he rages on endlessly, one can forget what point he is trying to make to Robert Pattinson’s Ephraim Winslow. Pattinson plays a man on the run and a good one at that but in the end, the man on the run turns into a crazed and manic man that busts into the film, it isn’t that of a man who is under tireless pressure from start to finish as one should be on a lonesome island being bruised by the rain and waves.
The story itself makes no sense, one moment you think you have a grasp of what is going on but in the next, there are elements that make the thoughts you previously had, seem unconnected. It isn’t that the film has outsmarted you, that would have been welcomed. It is that the story seems to jump to places that only a viewer versed in the arthouse-esque films of A24 would be able to follow. I have no doubt that there is a deep meaning in the imagery and a reason for the madness but one goes to a film because they want to partake in escapism. One cannot do that if they do not understand the character that they are undertaking or the story in which they are a part of.
In Theaters Friday, October 25th
