Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse is a film that critics adored and audiences endured. Released in 2019 and filmed in gloriously square 1.19:1 aspect ratio because—of course—it had to look like a haunted Instagram filter from 1890, this moody black-and-white fever dream was supposed to be art. Instead, it plays like a sadistic endurance test, a maritime-themed psychosexual slog that leaves you wondering if anyone involved has ever actually seen a lighthouse or just read about one while blackout drunk on turpentine.
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Set on a remote New England island in the 1890s, The Lighthouse stars Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson as two men who share a stone phallus and slowly lose their minds—along with our patience. Dafoe plays Thomas Wake, a crusty old fart of a lighthouse keeper who speaks like a pirate with a thesaurus jammed up his ass. Pattinson plays Ephraim Winslow, a tight-lipped young drifter with a haunted past and an even more haunted libido. Together, they do what men always do when isolated: drink, fart, fight, and engage in metaphorical circle jerks of power, guilt, and mythic imagery.
On paper, this sounds promising—two top-tier actors, confined space, psychological unraveling. A descent into madness! But on screen, it’s like watching Waiting for Godot rewritten by a horny sea captain who hates the audience. There’s no real plot, just a series of escalating non-events: cooking arguments, seagull abuse, drunken monologues, masturbation montages, and enough gaslighting to power a Victorian asylum. It’s the kind of movie where you leave the theater knowing less than when you walked in, and not in a fun, Mulholland Drive way—more like waking up after a blackout and discovering you’ve painted your bathroom with squid ink.
The dialogue is aggressively old-timey, like Eggers swallowed a Moby Dick audiobook and vomited it onto the script. Dafoe bellows his way through Shakespearean sea curses and lengthy invocations to Poseidon, while Pattinson mumbles like a man trying to pass a kidney stone of repressed rage. It’s all meant to be symbolic, of course, and “rich with meaning”—you know, the kind of meaning that gets you an A+ in Film Studies 301 and ensures no one ever invites you to parties.
Visually, sure, it’s striking. The cinematography is gorgeous, if you like your gorgeousness steeped in fog, piss, and metaphor. There are frames here that look like 19th-century daguerreotypes of sadness. Jarin Blaschke’s camera makes every rock, wave, and beard follicle glisten with gothic intensity. But aesthetics can only carry you so far. Eventually, you realize this whole thing is just two men screaming at each other in increasingly surreal tableaus, like an old-timey TikTok sketch that never ends.
Eggers, clearly a fan of slow-burn horror, throws everything at the screen—mermaids, tentacles, hallucinations, farts—but nothing lands with real emotional weight. The horror isn’t scary, the symbolism is suffocating, and the tone wobbles between earnest myth-making and Monty Python absurdity. One minute, Dafoe is delivering a monologue about Triton’s wrath like he’s gunning for an Oscar. The next, Pattinson is beating a seagull to death like it owes him money.
Speaking of which—yes, the seagull scene. You’ve heard of it. It’s brutal. It’s shocking. It’s supposed to mean something about fate, guilt, or bad omens. Mostly, it just feels like an over-the-top attempt to be disturbing in a movie already drowning in try-hard weirdness. Like so much else in The Lighthouse, it’s unclear if the violence serves the story or just Eggers’ desire to see how far he can push an audience before they walk out and demand a refund in barnacles.
The performances? Technically impressive. Emotionally exhausting. Willem Dafoe is doing some kind of sea-shanty Shakespeare cosplay, all bug-eyed menace and nautical despair. He gives 110% in a movie that maybe deserves 47%. Robert Pattinson commits too, grimacing and grunting his way through mental collapse, sexual repression, and fish-humping fever dreams. The man masturbates on screen more than a teenage boy locked in a Blockbuster’s adult section. At one point he screams “You’re not God!” at Dafoe while standing fully nude in a thunderstorm. This is either a profound statement about masculinity or the world’s most cursed Calvin Klein commercial.
And let’s talk about the lighthouse itself—because it’s the title, after all. The glowing beacon becomes a stand-in for everything: salvation, madness, obsession, the divine. It pulses, it beckons, it moans. Much like the audience, stuck wondering what the hell is actually inside that light. Spoiler: we never really find out. There’s a final confrontation with The Truth™ that ends in an epileptic orgy of light and screaming, followed by a descent down the stairs and then a Prometheus reference so on-the-nose it may as well be tattooed on Eggers’ forehead.
Is it art? Probably. Is it good? Not really. The Lighthouse feels like a parody of prestige horror, the kind of film that critics pretend to love because it’s daring and “uncompromising,” when really it’s just stubborn, tedious, and drunk on its own metaphor. It’s not that I need my movies to explain everything—but I do like them to say something besides “I read a lot of Melville and had a weird dream once.”
At best, The Lighthouse is a cinematic experiment that would’ve made a killer 30-minute short. At worst, it’s two hours of wet-bearded madness trapped in a feedback loop of pretentious art-school wankery. It’s the cinematic equivalent of eating oysters with a blindfold on: slimy, disorienting, and guaranteed to leave half the table pretending they liked it just to seem cultured.
By the time the credits roll, you’ll either feel like you’ve experienced a masterpiece or you’ve been tricked into watching two men go insane in a maritime hellscape while slowly transforming into a Reddit thread about Nietzsche. For some, that’s brilliant. For the rest of us, it’s just Tuesday with a headache.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 tentacles.
Come for the art, stay for the farts, leave with a newfound hatred for seagulls and the creeping suspicion that the real madness was the friends we didn’t make along the way.