The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019)

I'm not sure if The Lighthouse is a riddle of a film or a kind of moving poem about descending into madness. Either way, it's engaging. It's beautifully shot, with great performances by Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, and has some moments of genuine humor. Like The Witch before it, the attention to detail in the world it's creating is masterful. What it lacks is narrative cohesion. 

There is a story in here. Two men are contracted to tend a lighthouse in the eighteen hundreds. One or both of them slowly lose their grip on reality through the course of the film. One of them may not have had much of a grip on reality when the film begins. It's almost impossible to know, which is where the film squanders it's other truly outstanding qualities. 

There are pieces of a story about the pettiness of men when even the smallest bit of power is in question. There's a story about destructive power of guilt. There's a story about questioning one's own grasp on reality when all we have to reflect ourselves in is a lie. There are even stories in here about working class struggle for survival and labor/management struggles. Then, there is also a story about one or two men losing their grip on reality. The Lighthouse doesn't seem to want to commit to any of those stories except the aspect of losing their grip on reality, and it doesn't commit to anything else about that story. It's committed to the fact that one or both of them are going mad, but not why or whether it's one or both of them. It hints at plenty, but never commits to any of it. It doesn't even commit to whether or not there is some aspect of the supernatural at work in the story. 

There are a number of visual moments in this film which are memorable. Some of them are of the more fantastical variety, which can be expected in a film flirting as heavily with the horror genre as The Lighthouse is. More interestingly though, one of them is just a long shot of Willem Dafoe, lit from below as he plunges into a monologue. His face is utterly transformed and is vaguely terrifying, and it is also absolutely gorgeous. I stared at the screen, mouth hanging open for a second as it was happening, because of the combination of the simplicity and beauty of the shot. It's a shot that makes the choice to do this film in black and white make complete sense. 

There are some moments of real dread and intensity. Dafoe and Pattinson are great together, and they are both obviously committed to their roles. They're engaging and engrossing to watch. Everything can turn on a dime between them, and it's absolutely believable. 

The Lighthouse ends up feeling like an exercise. It has all of these wonderful elements, very lovingly attended to and still, the problems with the failure to string together more of a narrative end up doing all of the work put into those beautiful pieces harm by taking away from the power of the finished film. Ambiguity can be a great element in a film, but this is something more than ambiguity, and I'm among the last to trash a director because they tried for something they just didn't quite reach. This seems less like a case of over ambition or a desire not to spoon feed the audience too much exposition. 

I'm going to reserve the right to change my opinion on this one, given the opportunity to see it again. In this first viewing though, as engaging as the performances, all of the design work and cinematography were, it didn't work for me in the end. My experience was that I was engrossed and I was engaged because of what does work about the film, but the second it ended, so did the power of the film, and it's primarily because of how little it attends its narrative through lines.