The Lighthouse is Wack [SPOILERS]
In his follow-up to The VVitch, Robert Eggers directs a woke masterpiece of farts and frequent masturbation. The Lighthouse follows Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) and Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) taking care of a Lighthouse for four weeks. However, “A Series of Unfortunate Events” start to happen as soon as EPHRAIM WINSLOW murders a seagull, which causes the wind to turn and the duo to be stuck in a lighthouse longer than they’d anticipate.
The beauty of The Lighthouse solely resides in Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe’s terrific performances. Pattinson gives a career-best performance as EPHRAIM WINSLOW, who steals every inch of the screen once he starts to lose it. The best sequences of the entire film are when Winslow & Wake start to go off at each other. This is where Dafoe & Pattinson truly shines. I especially loved the sold-out audience reactions to the movie, in which many dialogue scenes involve really awkward moments of humor (“And your goddamn farts!”, “What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What?”) only to delve deep into madness and up the tension after 0.5 seconds. The tension-shifts are jarring, but always keep you on edge during the entire runtime. The cinematography from Jarin Blaschke is definitely Oscar-worthy, presented in stunning Black & White with a 1.19:1 aspect ratio makes the emotion and tension running through feel tighter. One scene in particular, when Winslow paints a wall while Wake tries to hold the wobbly structure. The cinematography is particularly good in this sequence, or during the many moments of tension in which the tight square fits the screen in.
The Lighthouse is definitely a slow-burn, perfectly setting-up every moment of tension that will happen during its second and third act, but it’s really once Winslow kills viciously a seagull that the movie jumps from “enjoyable” to “amazing”. Seeing, on the big screen, with a 4k laser projection and Dolby Atmos surround sound, the descent into madness of Ephraim Winslow (or Thomas Howard?) and Thomas Wake is one of the best cinema experiences I’ve had in 2020, so far. There are many weird moments in The Lighthouse that made the audience burst into uncontrollable laughter — including the moment in which Winslow viciously masturbates while thinking of a mermaid’s pussy or the ending in which Winslow/Howard viciously screams at a lantern, and the sound is distorted, falls down the stairs and gets eaten by seagulls. There is a big reference to Kubrick’s The Shining near the climax. Its musical cue is obvious, but it adds to the weirdness of the cinematic experience. Eggers perfectly crafts the world during the film’s first act, and sets-up how the characters interact with one another. Once the seagull dies, Eggers decides to take the audience on a special cinematic ride unlike any other. It’s definitely one of the most unique films of 2019 — and one of A24’s very best, though it isn’t as good as the cinematic colonoscopy of Uncut Gems.
I do recommend seeing The Lighthouse in theaters, but the movie recently came out on Blu-Ray. That being said, if you’re in Montréal, the Cinéma Moderne has special screenings of that film and Uncut Gems, two cinema experiences you don’t want to miss.
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