Review of The Lighthouse (2019) by Kenr — 08 Jan 2020

Having a love of all things set around the sea and classic navigational aids, it was essential to see ‘The Lighthouse’ - not so sure it was a good idea though. It’s a movie to make you feel both sickened and exhausted.

The exhaustion is not so much from watching the harrowing events but from forcing yourself to last the distance. Great movies have been made with thought-provoking prose telling of highly strained relationships; O’Neil’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Mourning becomes Elektra, Melville’s Moby Dick, along with several similar writings by Edgar Allen Poe, being just a few.

This grotesque, gothic horror yarn borrows from just about all of these in an attempt to bring to life its relentless assault on the hapless viewer’s senses. The end result may prove to please the horror aficionados or audiences with sadeo-masochistic tendencies.

It pounds you over the head with an endless barrage of perverse abuse and vulgarity, till you want to reach for the remote to escape or move on in double speed. This sort of theme, in the past, would have been made as an effective 50min experimental featurette (BFI or CNFB style) As is, the endless morbid visual and sound scapes, tend to weigh you down to the point of wanting to walk out.

The two performers are hard-working but a good movie needs more than slick acting to be enjoyable. I’m OK with the use of beautiful, moody, well lit Black and White cinematography but don’t see the advantage of shooting in an odd variation of the old 4 x 3 mode, as it added little or nothing.

Also, with appearing to be set in the late 1800s early 1900s, these constructions would have been relatively newish and were quite well maintained but this set, looks so severely neglected as to be more like an untouched, 200 yr old museum piece.

Lastly, lugging heavy ‘steel’ barrels up a Spiral Staircase...step by step, single-handed, when you have a pulley system outside seemed odd (?) Strictly for ‘arty’ self-abusers and the Awards crowd.