a rich and strange sea yarn in monochrome that overflows with Beckettian absurdity, as these men, perhaps both liars (literal gaslighters), look, while waiting for ‘relief’, into the abyss of both their elemental isolation & their infernal companionship.

| Jun 19, 2023

The Lighthouse may be challenging, it may even be off-putting, but it's gutsy, accomplished and the kind of movie that sears into your memory.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 28, 2020

The atmosphere is ugly, claustrophobic, hermetic, the images murky and relentless. There seems no doubt Eggers is an original and talented filmmaker, but he hasn't made it easy on the audience with this grim, forbidding movie.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 11, 2020

As with The Witch, it's the atmosphere that seeps into you like sea brine. You don't watch this film, you are submerged in it. Expect to be spat out, reeling, from the cinema, clutching on to your sanity.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 5, 2020

American writer-director Robert Eggers excels at transporting you into the past and putting you under the skin of those you meet there. Persuading you to be glad that you came is another matter.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 5, 2020

The lewd, overwrought, Herman Melville-inspired dialogue is alternately mumbled and shouted, the intense, grand guignol performances more interesting as an experiment than conducive to eliciting meaning.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 2, 2020

The Lighthouse is a pressure-cooker.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 31, 2020

It's the kind of language that roots you to the spot, and it's terrific, much like everything else.

| Jan 30, 2020

It is perfectly possible to admire the film and to still feel that it amounts to little more than a storm in a teacup. A painstakingly sourced authentic period teacup with original 19th-century patterning, of course, but a teacup all the same.

| Jan 30, 2020

The longer the film goes on, the weirder it gets and the more it resembles a sitcom - The Odd Couple in sou'westers, a droll symphony of bodily functions, bubbling friction and all manner of desires that dare not speak their name.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 29, 2020

Eggers masters the dangerous mix of horror and comedy.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 29, 2020

Conjuring menace and mystery from solitude and seagulls, The Lighthouse is a folk tale, a black comedy, a horror, a mystery, a (platonic?) romance - and something more still, something unspeakable. Something like a masterpiece, perhaps.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 27, 2020

Like Pattinson's Ephraim, The Lighthouse is weird, complex, testing... and soulless.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Nov 2, 2019

The ambiguity of this movie is what makes it feel special.

| Original Score: A+ | Oct 28, 2019

The actors play it big and bold in a visually striking, black and white horror show.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 25, 2019

The visceral, disgusting, and irrefutably maddening theatrics of The Lighthouse are entrancing enough to have viewers happily giving themselves over to a beckoning siren by film's end.

| Oct 25, 2019

It's rough going, but it's beautifully filmed and framed in black and white, and Dafoe is wild and wildly entertaining in a role that feels written to match his every aspect.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 25, 2019

Pattinson is superb but it's Dafoe who emerges as a giant with a towering, unforgettable performance.

| Original Score: A- | Oct 25, 2019

What is the opposite of a crowd-pleaser? A crowd-splitter, maybe? Whatever you call it, "The Lighthouse" is one.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 24, 2019

"The Lighthouse" feels terrifying due to its remoteness and distance from the present.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Oct 24, 2019