WHAT I LIKED: Max and Robert Eggers' 'The Lighthouse,' follows a wickie called Wake (Willem Dafoe) and his new assistant Winslow (Robert Pattinson) on a rock in the ocean to maintain a lighthouse. But though the premise is simple, the narrative is primarily buoyed by the mysteries that the central pair hold but won't share.
That sense of unease is built right from the opening frames as Eggers has their boat loom through fog and then ominously retreat as Winslow looks anxiously from the shore of his new home. But as they set up in the island's ramshackle house, there's also a visible distance between the two men that builds on the setting's obvious sense of creepy isolation. Their first conversation is sparse; the only real reveal being that Wake will be gatekeeping the lighthouse from Winslow because, as he later tells, his previous skipper became obsessed with it and died. The true reasoning for any of that is shrouded though because Wake speaks mostly in riddles, and Winslow doesn't pry; favouring silence over answering any questions asked of him, and putting all of his boss' mysteries down to tall sailor tales. Further strangeness creeps in though as he starts having vivid nightmares about a mermaid after he finds an ornament of one belonging to his predecessor, and a gull on the island starts haunting him much to the concern of Wake who says that gulls are the spirits of dead sailors.
That all builds a sense of deep mystery about the island and its two inhabitants (a fact exacerbated tenfold by Mark Korven's brilliantly creepy score and the sound design, and Jarin Blaschke's moody, environment-building black and white cinematography) and as a result, you spend your time longing to figure out the truth behind Wake's description of past events and his guarding of the lighthouse, and whether the things haunting Winslow are a result of the island or a more internal darkness.
Answers are teased throughout the film as the pair become increasingly frustrated with the secrecy - we learn for example that Winslow killed a man and is in search of a clean slate, and after a storm scuppers their chances of leaving on schedule, we learn from an amusing, drunken conversation that they've been hiding their real names from each other - but more often than not that just results in confusing contradictions. They're basically incapable of having an earnest conversation, and instead go from silence, to humour, and then to fighting in their exasperation.
As a result, the true answers to all of their questions are never overtly revealed, and instead the film ends with Winslow killing Wake in a fit of drunken rage and paranoia, ascending to the lighthouse, and then dying himself. The fact the final moment of ascendence to knowledge and freedom literally kills Winslow brilliantly highlights how closed off he and Wake were, and ultimately, the danger of that kind of toxic masculinity becomes the final message of the film.
WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: It is a pretty disconcerting watch...
VERDICT: Robert Eggers' 'The Lighthouse,' is about two men keeping secrets, but the only thing the film reveals is how dangerous that can be.
