Review of The Lighthouse (2019) by Brent_Marchant — 17 Feb 2020

Gorgeous cinematography, decent acting, a haunting soundtrack and a superbly crafted atmospheric mood aside, this otherwise-pointless, incomprehensible mess of a movie is a phenomenally huge, utterly confusing waste of time.

Writer-director Robert Eggers meticulously creates a well-crafted setting to tell a story and then fails to fill it with a tale worthy of its precisely realized milieu. In fact, what's supposed to be haunting and scary turns out to be downright laughable in the second hour, especially as the picture painfully limps toward its long-overdue conclusion.

Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson deliver capable performances -- that is, when they can be understood, their mangled elocution of the picture's Herman Melville-esque dialogue so distorted that it's impossible to decipher what they're saying no matter how many times one plays back each painfully tedious scene.

Whatever the filmmaker was going for here, it's certainly lost on the audience.