Finny!’s review published on Letterboxd:
''Ye make me laugh with yer false grum. Ye pretended to some mystery in yer quietudes, but there ain’t no mystery, yer an open book. A picture, says I.''
There's an ironic insincerity to The Lighthouse.
Every scene and shot is hypercalculated.
It's all mathematically designed to maximise the film's 'wow' factor. Mathematically designed to be stunning and unique.
The Lighthouse is so self-consciously 'artistic.'
And i find it repulsive.
There's no spirit here.
The great masters of cinema—filmmakers like Tarkovsky and Fellini—used their technical mastery to enhance their work's more spiritual, romantic cores.
But Eggers seems to have no legitimate spiritual or romantic core to his film.
The Lighthouse is all affectation.
It feels like it's trying harder to impress critics and cinephiles than it is to express some pure artistic vision.
There's a cinematic and literary lineage this film comes from. But it's been filtered through so many ironic subversions, inversions, references, and riffs... it feels like what's left is a postmodern critique masquerading as an honest work, without any of the sincerity of the material it's constructed from.
A book like Moby Dick is aesthetically obsessive, almost to a fault, but there's a soul in there too. A clunky honesty.
The Lighthouse feels like it wants to ape the aesthetic obsession that comes from a religious devotion to art, but the religious devotion to the art just isn't there.
It's hipster spirituality.
A hollow, soulless film, desperate to pretend it has a soul.
The Lighthouse is a photocopy of a painting of a photograph pretending to be the subject of the image.
