Day 11: The Lighthouse (2019)

Goal: Find a horror movie that is supposed to be great, but you’re afraid you won’t like.

What I knew before watching

I recently saw the trailer. It seemed stylish in a way that could either work brilliantly or seem like it’s trying too hard. It was slow, avant-garde, and didn’t seem to care much about showing what the plot was—if there even was one.

Willem Dafoe, an actor I’ve never much liked, has somehow become the most respected name in arthouse movies, and I’ve yet to figure out why. I haven’t seen his two most acclaimed performances—this and The Florida Project. Robert Eggers is a director I respect for his ambition and his taste in material. I’ve liked all of his movies, but I’ve never loved one. The Witch was my favorite, but it still felt like half a movie.

There’s an American Dad episode from 2022 called “Gold Top Nuts” where Stan and the family take a budget vacation that ends in a plane crash on a mysterious island. They lose all memory of who they are, become desocialized, and start wandering around naked. Inside a lighthouse, they find a VHS tape containing a single commercial—for a product called Gold Top Nuts—which they watch repeatedly until it becomes their religion. The tape finally dies when Stan places a magnetic rock on the VCR, and the family takes this as a divine sign to leave the island.

It’s a weird, singular episode, and I’ve always wondered what inspired it. Maybe it was The Lighthouse? Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson maybe don’t frolic naked around an island, but they do live in a lighthouse and gradually lose their minds. Perhaps that’s the connection. Then again, The Lighthouse takes place in the 1890s—before radio, let alone VHS—so maybe not.

Still, I hope there’s something truly hidden or transcendent about this movie, because on paper, it sounds like a boring idea.


—

After the movie:

What a thematically rich and hard-to-pin-down experience. What was this? A folk-horror fable? A psychological thriller in the vein of Polanski’s Repulsion? A filmed stage play with powerhouse performances? Or the dark ride preview for a new Disneyland attraction?

It’s a bit of each. (Hopefully.)

The “lighthouse causing madness” trope is new to me, and no—the American Dad episode doesn’t really relate, though trivia pages do list it as “inspired by The Lighthouse.” Maybe that’s just someone guessing, but I get why they’d think so.

This feels like a complete movie. The Witch always felt like it needed a third act; The Lighthouse delivers exactly what it promises—two men losing their grip on sanity in isolation. That’s a tougher sell to audiences, and it earned only about 40% of The Witch’s box office, but it’s the superior film: tighter, clearer in purpose, and not easy to dismiss as “great until the last twenty minutes.”

It’s ultimately a simple story about what happens when you live with someone you wouldn’t otherwise tolerate. I compare it to Repulsion because disgust drives much of Thomas Howard’s (Robert Pattinson) mental decay. In Repulsion, Carol Ledoux is repulsed by her sister’s lover—particularly when his toothbrush contaminates her mouthwash cup. In The Lighthouse, Thom is revolted by the flatulence of the man sleeping five feet away. Even the creaking boards of the storm-battered shack seem to echo Willem Dafoe’s farts. Every shift of the wind becomes an olfactory trigger.

Willem Dafoe gives one of the greatest horror performances I’ve seen. He convinces you that this is exactly how a lighthouse keeper would have sounded in 1890—even though no one could possibly know. Or maybe someone could.

The reason it feels authentic is that Robert Eggers built the dialogue from the writings of Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909), who transcribed the dialects of Maine’s fishermen and lighthouse keepers, and paired them with the salt-soaked cadences of Herman Melville. The result sounds like Dafoe studied recordings made decades before recording existed. Eggers is now the master of this trick—painstakingly reconstructing lost voices for The Witch and The Northman (even if his Vikings conveniently speak English).

The Lighthouse flirts with realism but lands squarely in folk horror: a world where curses, seabirds, and Cthulhu-like tentacles coexist with human guilt. Thom isn’t a sailor, yet his hallucinations teem with sea monsters and mythic fears that belong to men who’ve spent lifetimes at sea. The horror isn’t that he’s imagining them—it’s that they might be real. In Eggers’s world, if you live with secrets and act carelessly, the sea itself will swallow you whole.

Dafoe’s accent might be the film’s most hypnotic element, but Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography deserves equal praise. Every frame looks hand-composed and electrified, dense with atmosphere—like candlelight on wet glass. Blaschke was nominated for an Oscar (he lost to 1917), and while I love that movie, The Lighthouse is the one that should hang in museums. He’s since been nominated again for Nosferatu; it feels inevitable he’ll win eventually.

The film’s most unnerving scene isn’t monstrous but human: two lonely, drunk men on the verge of a kiss. They utterly hate each other, yet they suddenly are about to make out? Uh, no. Abort!  They waltz together because there’s nothing else to do, sure, but why would they ever go beyond that? It’s both comic and terrifying—proof that intimacy, when born of isolation, feels grotesque.

This is an actor’s movie through and through. Dafoe and Pattinson hit their monologues btilliantly—each word chewed, every beat deliberate. When Dafoe’s Thomas Wake finally tells Pattinson’s Thom, “You have a way with words,” it’s the movie’s thesis. The two Thoms want bury each other, and for no reason at all, they seem to want to be buried.

You know where this is going.

8.5 / 10