The Lighthouse

a rich and strange sea yarn in monochrome that overflows with Beckettian absurdity, as these men, perhaps both liars (literal gaslighters), look, while waiting for ‘relief’, into the abyss of both their elemental isolation & their infernal companionship.


The Lighthouse may be challenging, it may even be off-putting, but it's gutsy, accomplished and the kind of movie that sears into your memory.

The atmosphere is ugly, claustrophobic, hermetic, the images murky and relentless. There seems no doubt Eggers is an original and talented filmmaker, but he hasn't made it easy on the audience with this grim, forbidding movie.

As with The Witch, it's the atmosphere that seeps into you like sea brine. You don't watch this film, you are submerged in it. Expect to be spat out, reeling, from the cinema, clutching on to your sanity.

American writer-director Robert Eggers excels at transporting you into the past and putting you under the skin of those you meet there. Persuading you to be glad that you came is another matter.

The lewd, overwrought, Herman Melville-inspired dialogue is alternately mumbled and shouted, the intense, grand guignol performances more interesting as an experiment than conducive to eliciting meaning.

Working in harmony, Mark Korven’s musical horror and Damien Volpe’s sound design consistently bubble under the surface, hinting at unsettling and unfolding motifs.

Filmed in beautiful black-and-white with a claustrophobic aspect ratio, Robert Eggers delivers a story about loneliness and isolation that takes the weirdest, craziest route. I don't have a single complaint, and I love it more the more I think about it.

As a dark fable, The Lighthouse resonates on the level of collective memory and myth, providing a thoroughly engrossing, veritable masterpiece of performance, period detail and visual inventiveness.

...you can almost taste the sea-salt and smell the stench of booze in the air. Robert Eggers’ “The Lighthouse” is a sea yarn full of sailor superstitions&#59; it could be the most haunting film about sea-lore ever made. Save it for a cold stormy night.