Drown Me, Please - The Lighthouse

This is the kind of movie you might legitimately end a friendship over. Unless they knew that your particular brand of quirk aligned with this movie’s narrow sense of humor and irony, their only possible reason for recommending would be that they hate you. Perhaps they wanted you to waste two hours in the same banal, self-obsessed experience they did.

This is like being hypnotized and having it not work. Instead you listen to the words, wondering why they have no effect on you and trying to figure out when it will be over. That is the charitable reading. The uncharitable take is that this is like a surgery where the anesthesia never kicks in. Instead, you feel every painful incision and every excruciating dissection. In sum, the worst.

The setup is that our characters, Thomas Wake (played by Willem Dafoe) and Ephraim Winslow (played by Robert Pattinson) are caretakers for a lighthouse. Thomas is the old hand who has been with this lighthouse for years, while Ephraim is new to the profession and must earn the respect of Thomas. The pair bond over meals and song, but their relationship is fraught with a certain frothy disdain for one another.

Ephraim’s duties are largely based on cleaning and maintaining their quarters, while Thomas takes care of the light. When Thomas refuses to relinquish these duties and share in the responsibility, Ephraim’s frustration grows. The two eventually clash over their unwillingness to compromise and nonsense ensues.

I actually think it achieved what it set out to, but what it set out to do was waste my time. It’s central premise—these two men isolated and struggling for the upper hand—always seemed too limited to feel relevant in 2019. But the allure of the talented people involved left room for optimism. Unfortunately that optimism is quickly snuffed out by the weight of the uncompromisingly obtuse direction.

The stark visuals and grayscale patience build a ‘capital A, capital H’ “Art House” experience, but its inaccessibility only deepens the inherent flaws. In this era of widespread despair, escaping to an even more miserable landscape is not a good use of people’s time. And that that landscape has nothing to say about our world makes it all the more useless. In this case, its “timeless” themes serve as a euphemism for generic. Boiled down and captured properly, this is just another movie. Remove the showy elements and art school choices, and there is literally no reason to see this.

This is a mostly punishing experience. The lone bright spots are monologues from Dafoe and Pattison (mostly Dafoe). The problem is that those bright spots are so few and far between that you start to feel just as miserable as the characters. Eggers has a way with words. There is no denying that. It’s just that in this case, that way is used in service of an altogether meaningless experience.

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