The Lighthouse *** (2019, Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe) – Movie Review

Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe are both tremendous under very difficult circumstances in perfectly judged performances as lighthouse keepers Thomas Howard and Thomas Wake going crazy while living and working on a remote New England island in the 1890s.

On the one hand director Robert Eggers’s two-hander period drama The Lighthouse (2019) is incredibly clever in its Waiting for Godot sort of way, and on the other hand, it is arty, boring and depressing. If Waiting for Godot springs immediately, the S&M mind games between the two characters most recall What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?.

It has vague elements of being a fantasy horror film, and it is strikingly eerie, disturbing and unreal, successfully pulling you into its weird world, but it goes round and round in circles and has hardly any entertainment value at all. Viewers will probably be as keen to get out of the cinema as the characters would be to get off the island. But at least it is unique, and welcome for that, if only no one has to sit through it twice.

Jarin Blaschke’s black and white cinematography is dazzling, and richly deserves its Oscar and Bafta nominations. Robert and Max Eggers’s screenplay, drawing on Moby Dick and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Light-House, is extremely convincing, with thoroughly satisfying dialogue, chewed over and spat out brilliantly by the star duo, with Dafoe providing a masterclass in insanity.

Pattinson and Dafoe give it their all.

The film began as an attempt by Max Eggers to adapt Edgar Allan Poe’s The Light-House but the eventual story is very different.

Eggers’s previous film is the 2015 The Witch.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Movie Review

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