The Lighthouse – 2019
I’m a romantic about lighthouses. I love their symbolism, beacons of light in the darkness, sources of strength, guidance, and hope. I carry around a Lighthouse Passport and collect stamps for every one visited. Friends shower me with gifts with a lighthouse motif. I’m a proud card-carrying member of the U.S. Lighthouse Society looking forward to the time when I can join their lighthouse travel tours. Then comes this movie. Well, where to begin? The Lighthouse was shot in black and white and used filming techniques that mimic the silent movie boxy look. The effect was like watching 110 screen minutes squinting through a square storm cloud. The nostalgic benefit of a silent movie is lively organ music bubbling up from the orchestra pit. The sound effect of this movie was the unrelenting deafening and deadening moan of a fog horn. At first it jarred me. Eventually it sedated me and for a short while I oozed along in morbid rhythm with the drab and drizzle. Disrupting my fog horn catatonia were crashing waves of fights, farts, mud, blood, and vomit bracketed by grotesque scenes of repulsive cistern contamination, mermaid masturbation and seagull penis-pecking. Set at the end of the 19th century on a remote, bleak island off the New England coast, two men, Keeper Thomas Wake (Willem Defoe) and flunkie Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson), find themselves tending the lighthouse together for a one month watch. Dipping into Herman Melville manuscripts to salt the dialogue of madness and drawing from maritime superstitions and seafaring tales of mermaids, seabirds, sailors, and tentacled monsters, we are held captive in this noxious cinematic hallucination just like Thomas and Ephraim are held captives on their claustrophobic, wave-pounded, misery-making, isolated island of horror. No way off. For them. No way out. For me. Somewhere after the drunken ax attack but before the psychotic Fresnel lens lunacy, I considered packing up and walking out. Instead I sat, stubbornly believing that a lighthouse movie would eventually flicker with a tiny ray of redemptive illumination. Well, it didn’t. There is an inside joke in my household about “cut to black” movies. Sensing unrequited plot resolution, the inevitable fate of many indie art house films, one of us will lean over and whisper “cut to black.” Predictably, the screen will simply go dark and the credits roll, a feeble, faux-creative strategy pressed into action when (1) the director runs out of ideas about how to end the movie, or (2) the producer runs out of money. So there you have it. The Lighthouse. Cut to black.
