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I rarely go to the movies. I vastly prefer watching a film at home. It takes a lot to get me to go see something in the theater, but I made one of my infrequent trips to the local theater to see Robert Eggers' newest film, The Lighthouse. Ever since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, this film has been wowing critics all over the world, getting critical acclaim from everyone who saw it. The concept sounded interesting, and I enjoyed the trailer, so I decided to check it out as soon as possible.
The first thing many people are mentioning, and the thing that immediately hits you when the film begins, is the aspect ratio it was filmed in. The movie is shot in a boxy format, tossing aside the usual widescreen format in favor of a much more compact frame. This offers an immediate feeling of claustrophobia and gave me hope that I was in for an exciting movie experience.
Unfortunately, the atmosphere caused by the aspect ratio and the choice to shoot in black and white over color is where my praise for this movie begins and ends. I am not going to sugar coat it or go in half-way with backwards insults. To put it bluntly: I hated this movie. HATED. I hated everything about it. I hated what passed for a story. I hated the acting. I hated the actual shot composition in every way that wasn't involving the aspect ratio. I hated the damn foghorn that went off seemingly every 30 seconds for the entirety of the film's duration.
When I read the buzz on this movie, all I heard about was the amazing acting, the incredible cinematography, and the excellent story. Critics and audiences alike were falling over themselves as they heaped praise on this film, calling it a masterpiece. This leads me to think one of two things has happened here: Either A- I am too stupid to understand what I saw, or B-nobody understood this movie, and didn't want to admit it, so they figured if they found it overly confusing, it must be brilliant.
This movie is supposed to be a psychological thriller, following two isolated men's decent into madness, but it actually plays more like a parody of independent film. This movie is one long cliché from start to finish.
Black and white? Check
Big movie star in a small movie trying to get taken seriously as more than a tween heart throb? Check.
Older character actor in a prominent role? Check.
Dream sequences interspersed in such a way that you can't tell what is real and what is fantasy? Check
Atmospheric background "music" with zero melody? Check
Open ended, pretentious non-finale that answers zero questions and can be interpreted any number of ways by an audience too embarrassed to admit nothing they saw made any sense? Check and double check!
I would give a spoiler warning, but even though I sat through this movie, I still have no clue what happened. There was a lot of yelling. Foghorns. A lot of screaming. Foghorns. Rain. Foghorns. Fighting. Foghorns. Dream sequences. Rain. Foghorns. More fighting. More foghorns. More yelling. A fight scene between Robert Pattenson and a seagull. Foghorns. Some more fighting. Rain. And for good measure, foghorns. Then a horrible ending.
I have been racking my brain trying to figure out the best way to describe the experience of watching The Lighthouse and I think I have come up with the perfect way to do so. Have you ever had somebody try to describe a dream to you, but the dream made zero sense, and they barely remember it? They are rambling on, backtracking, trying to describe something that they themselves didn't understand, makes zero sense, and they don't actually remember? That painful conversation usually lasts about three minutes. Now have that conversation for an hour and forty five minutes, while a foghorn blasts in your ear over and over. That is what watching The Lighthouse is like.
There are two people credited with the screenplay for this movie, but I refuse to believe an actual script exists. I have put more thought into this movie review than the screenwriters did the actual movie. It is good that the movie is so dark and everything is hard to make out, because both Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson do so much over acting, that I am convinced the scenery had actual bite marks in it. Half of the movie is so confusingly shot, I could barely tell the two actors apart. Even the rain looked overly fake. I swear if the camera panned over a few feet to the side, you would see people with buckets and sprinklers at the ready. The only person who went above and beyond in their job performance in the making of this movie was whomever was responsible for sounding the foghorn. That person deserves a special Oscar for stamina.
The characters in this movie spend the majority of the story questioning their sanity, and I have to admit, I know exactly how they feel. I am highly selective in what I go to see, and as a result, I rarely see a movie I don't enjoy to some degree. Yet I absolutely hated every second of this movie. Am I that out of touch with my own tastes? Am I losing my sense of self? I no longer know what is real. Who am I? How could I have been so wrong? Why is a movie I flat out loathed getting such universal acclaim? Is there something I am missing? Have I become incapable of recognizing genius? Or are these critics just covering for the fact that they didn't understand this movie any more than anyone else in my theater did?
As I left, I was thinking to myself how I had just witnessed the worst movie I have ever seen in my entire life. I was in stunned silence at being so wrong in thinking I would like this movie, when I overheard other people talking about the film. I felt a small measure of relief in the fact that every single one of them was talking about how terrible the movie was. I didn't hear one positive thing being said by the other movie-goers in my theater. So what did we all miss?
I am left with a feeling of confusion as I try to make sense of what I saw. At first, I thought it was not believable that two men would descend into madness over a period of only a few weeks, yet this movie managed to do it to me in less than two hours, so I guess it is more believable than I initially thought. Still, just because the movie was confusing and made me question my own relationship with myself, it did not do so in the way it intended. The only way I could see Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe going so crazy so quickly is if they were able to watch themselves in this movie, like the scene in Spaceballs where Rick Moranis is watching the VHS of the movie to figure out what is going on and gets to the part of the movie he is actually doing at that time.
Needless to say, I can not recommend this movie in any way. I went in excited, and left heartbroken. I thought this movie was going to be everything that I love about film making, but was instead, almost like a dark parody of it instead. This was (and I say this with all sincerity, and what I believe to be full command of my mental faculties) the worst movie I have ever seen.
Foghorn.
score 1/10
JohnVFerrigno 29 October 2019
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw5222623/ |
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2-12-2019 21:54:38
