The Lighthouse

9.5 The Lighthouse is a mystifingly surreal exploration of deteoriating psyche and a succombing to pure insanity, a waning grip on reality into the depths of madness. The movie is set in an isolated eeriness, an atmosphere built on the ambience of the sea. Only the same few noises, seagulls, the waves, and the anthem of isolation, the foghorn. Howard's reminder of seclusion. Each day is a mundane repetiton accompanied by the mundane notes of the sea. The film swallowes you in its ambience, and traps you in its loneliness. The film is a frustrated battle between two laborers and their deteoriation as a result. It's their delusion, their sole visualization of a fantasy so above them that they must interpret it literally. Their oblivion is height, it's bright, it's the only shine in a gloomy and bleak place that is the representation of their class and labor. They're working a lighthouse, they're bare laborers that invent a fantasy to ascend their reality, but end up falling beneath it to a place only madmen live. A distorted fantasy, a palpable insanity that ends in drunken rage and petty murder. Wake hogs this oblivion, and Howard seeks it. Wake invents exploits and builds his fantasy, and Howard's fantasy is the life of a former superior he grew to loathe. They both stepped foot on the island living in delusion, and on the island indulge in each other's desperate mirage of a life well-labored, or a life that will be well-labored. The young and the old, the aspiring and the aspired. But they both have nothing but the pathetic power dynamic between two men at the bottom, and the only goal either man can realistically aspire for. To see the light. But that's it. The light. The Lighthouse is an interpretive, dark and symbolic surreal ride through delusion waning reality's hold, and the barrest, most primitive visualization a man can carry for their goals when nothing is ahead of them, and anything can be anything they want.