Movie review: "The Lighthouse" is as empty as Al Capone's vault

A story ain’t a story without a plot.

You may have learned in school that a story consists of five elements. You set the scene and introduce your characters with your exposition. There’s rising action, which sets up the conflict and leads to a climax — the turning point in the story. After that, there’s falling action, as you move toward your ultimate destination: the resolution of your conflict.

Poems don’t work like this. They can be word pictures or mood pieces or character sketches. But those things aren’t stories.

Written prose and movies aren’t supposed to be like reading a poem or, to use another analogy, looking at a painting in an art gallery.

Imaging staring at a painting for two hours (if you’re watching a movie) or six hours (if you’re reading a book). You’ll fall asleep. This is the effect of a novel or movie without a plot.

Case in point: The Lighthouse, a critically lauded 2019 film starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson.

It’s as if writer-director Robert Eggars has served his audience a jar full of frosting without bothering to bake a cake. It’ll leave you feeling cheated and make you sick to your stomach in the bargain. I wanted to like The Lighthouse because the frosting tasted good. At first. I kept eating layer after layer of it, hoping I’d get to the cake.

But I never did; it just made me ill.

Piling on the pretense

Eggars has created a haunting atmosphere, with black-and-white photography, churning waves, howling winds, a lonely setting in a forgotten corner of the world. He’s hired a cinematographer, Jarin Blaschke, who earned an Oscar nomination for his work. He’s cast two fine actors who give strong performances — especially Dafoe, who portrays the lighthouse keeper as an archetypal old sea captain so skillfully he transcends the stereotypes he draws upon.

But he doesn’t tell a story. There’s no “there” there.

IMDb summarizes The Lighthouse as follows: “Two lighthouse keepers try to maintain their sanity whilst living on a remote and mysterious New England island in the 1890s.”

If you’ve read that sentence, you might as well have seen the movie. That’s really all that happens in 110 minutes.

I’d say there are spoilers ahead, because I’ll refer to certain things that happen in the film. But you can’t really spoil anything if nothing of substance ever happens. Nevertheless, if you don’t like knowing certain things in advance, stop reading here.

Nonsense and dead ends

I like a good psychological thriller: one that’s riddled with twists and turns, and unexpected revelations that lead to a chilling climax and a memorable conclusion. Think The Sixth Sense or The Matrix. If you want a movie that explores the tragic process of losing one’s marbles and actually goes somewhere, check out Joker.

Avoid The Lighthouse. There’s none of that here.

Without a bona fide plot to work with, Eggars somehow manages to fill up nearly two hours’ worth of film with loose ends, dead ends, and irrelevant nonsense. Pattinson’s character encounters a mermaid and sees Dafoe turn into a giant squid. Both characters get drunk. A lot. And masturbate. (Now that’s entertainment!) Dafoe launches into a soliloquy that’s impressive — not because of anything he says, but because it demonstrates he can recite so much material in one take.

But none of this advances the plot, because there is no plot.

Predictable and tedious

There’s also nothing unexpected about the movie, which is galling in the extreme precisely because it introduces threads in the non-plot that are neither explained nor resolved.

Pattinson’s revelation that he isn’t who he said he was seems significant, but it doesn’t have any bearing on where the movie winds up. He and Dafoe both end up dead, and they would have wound up dead with or without that revelation.

It’s never entirely clear whether Pattinson’s visions of the mermaid and the giant squid are real or hallucinations. I assume they’re the latter, but they don’t reveal anything about the character other than the fact that he’s going bonkers.

There’s the barest thread of a conflict that appears occasionally in the movie: The lighthouse keeper (Dafoe) jealously refuses to allow his assistant (Pattinson) to climb up and tend to the light. Near the end, Pattinson finally gains access to it. He climbs the staircase and enters the room. A cut-glass panel opens in front of him, and he gazes into the light, but we, the audience, never see what — if anything — he discovers.

The film’s tagline is, “The light has its mysteries.” But those mysteries, if they even exist outside the characters’ warped minds, are never resolved. We don’t even learn the answer to the most nagging of questions: why Dafoe’s character tries to smoke his pipe upside down.

Varied opinions

A lot of people liked this movie. Rotten Tomatoes gives it an audience rating of 72 percent, and the critics’ score is even higher. Maybe, for them, the cinematography, the bleak landscape, and the actors’ performances were enough to offset the lack of a plot.

But among those who didn’t enjoy it, the most frequent comments criticized its lack of plot, art-house pretensions and pointlessness. As one reviewer put it: “I'll never regain the two hours I lost watching this dreck.”

The Lighthouse is an artfully disguised exercise in the old bait-and-switch. Imagine you’re Dorothy and you’ve traveled down the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City, only to find out the wizard is really a snake-oil salesman hiding behind a curtain.

Better yet, maybe you remember Geraldo Rivera’s buildup before he opened Al Capone’s vault — only to find out there’s nothing there.

The Lighthouse is like that. It’s boring and pointless, yet it demands that you stay focused because if you don’t, you might miss something significant in Dafoe’s archaic dialogue, delivered in a thick Captain Ahab-meets-Montgomery Scott accent.

Not that it matters. Because in the end, there is nothing significant in Dafoe’s lines or anywhere else. There’s no cake beneath the frosting. No wizard behind the curtain. No treasure in the vault. It’s all just second-rate sleight-of-hand disguised by flourishes that keep you hoping the wait will be worth it.

It’s not. This movie will have you praying that a glittery vampire will show up to provide some bite and put you out of your misery. There’s no real story here. Just a meandering descent through insanity that leads you inexorably to a pointless dead end.

Rating: 1 (reluctant) star out of five

Stephen H. Provost is a former journalist and the author of 40 books, including non-fiction titles on America’s highways, city histories, shopping malls, rock music, philosophy, and social commentary. He has also written a number of fantasy and paranormal novels and short stories. All his works are available on Amazon.

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Just for fun: This parody contains just as much of plot as The Lighthouse and is actually funny. Best of all, it’s just 25 seconds long, so you won’t get bored.