Oh man this movie. Where to start. I saw the trailer a few times and could not get a feel for it. It looked weird. I like weird, but not all weird. And I had no idea what this movie was truly gonna be about beyond the obvious surface. Well, I watched it, and I still don’t know what it was really about.
Robert Pattinson and Willem DaFoe are lighthouse keepers on a New England island way back when. And they start going crazy or something? I really don’t know. I couldn’t tell what was real and what was imagine and or if the story was nonliner or when things were happening. Some of the artistic choices that people are raving about made it even more difficult to grasp the film.
It was filmed in black and white with a really tight aspect ratio, meant to look like it was made in the time period it was set in. I like the idea of that, and it looked really cool, but it made it that much harder to follow. The small frame felt frustratingly claustrophobic, like maybe there was something I couldn’t see that would have helped. And it was difficult to get the indoor lighting in black and light, so I couldn’t see expressions or details as I would have liked. Throw in the really thick colloquial accents and I didn’t understand what they were saying. All of which resulted in a very uphill battle.
The performances were great, which is where a lot of the Oscar buzz is coming from, but I couldn’t fully appreciate them without having a complete understanding of what was going on. It just didn’t add up to my flavor of weird. It’s working for some people, but for me, it just didn’t.
The Lighthouse – \m/ \n