The Lighthouse

2019 gay lighthouse keeper movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A lighthouse keeper with a spotlight fetish takes in a new assistant.

With its nods to silent cinema, emphasis on visuals over narrative, the grating sound design, surrealist touches, and performances by gifted seagull actors, this is very much my type of movie. The opening shot hooked me, and then all of the other shots hooked me, too. Willem Dafoe is barely intelligible, garbling lines pulled from Melville and sailor journals from a century or two ago, but he's just about perfect in this role as a grizzled veteran. And look who it is again! Robert Pattinson continues to gravitate to these auteur filmmakers and really challenging roles, likely an attempt to get the stink of Twilight off him.

A friend of mine named Eric didn't like this nearly as much as me, and my claim that it's the horniest movie I've seen in a long, long time didn't change his mind. Phallic lighthouses, furious masturbating, an obvious sexual tension between Pattinson and Dafoe. Eric dubbed it "Brokeback Lighthouse," and that doesn't feel wrong.

Eggers mixes all sorts of folklore and legend from the Northeast with Greek/Roman mythology and who knows what else to make something that is always compelling even when it's not entirely clear how it all comes together or if it even all comes together. If you put a harpoon to my head, I would say this is about what happens when men--and I mean men specifically, not women or mermaids--uncover the truths about themselves, their ambitions, their inspirations, their temptations, their sins, and phalluses.

And if you do have a bright light on the tip of your penis, you might want to get that checked out by a doctor.

This has a stand-out dream sequence, all sorts of fantastic though ostentatious imagery, and most surprisingly, a whole lot of humor. Laughter in my theater was uncomfortable, always a sign that a movie has my kind of humor. I didn't laugh because my laugh is obnoxious enough to make somebody want to take a peek and what kind of face that laugh is coming out of, and since I was watching this without pants, I didn't want anybody looking at me. My lighthouse, after all, was only at half mast.

Excuse the mixed metaphor. It feels appropriate with this movie though.