Critic Reviews

Eggers has created a film of disturbing horror, absurdist comedy and probing psychodrama which defies the generic boundaries as it breaks through them. The Lighthouse is a saltwater gothic masterpiece.

Very few films can make you scared and excited at the same time. Just like the lighthouse beam, this is dazzling and dangerous.

If the immediate, textural pleasures of the film are such that you can almost miss the deftness of its construction, the skill with which Eggers balances out his ambivalent storytelling, while still ramping through ever-escalating climaxes, can’t be overstated.

The Lighthouse leaves you dazed, terrified and elated, and it signals Eggers as one of the most exciting directors working today.

Everything about The Lighthouse lands with a crash. It’s cinema to make your head and soul ring.

By turns funny, sinister, haunting, historically fascinating and mythical, The Lighthouse is one of the best films of the year.

That’s all there is, the two men and the lighthouse — plus a matched pair of brilliant performances, torrents of astonishing language, a slow crescendo of fateful sounds and a succession of hypnotic images, in black and white on an almost square screen, that lend a rock-solid sense of reality to a growing struggle for dominance.

It’s bonkers and a hell of a film. And even better, with The Lighthouse, Eggers establishes that he’s more than a one trick pony. He’s a true original, auteur and clever filmmaker who isn’t interested in pandering.

Proves The Witch was no fluke. Dafoe and Pattinson dazzle in a luminous exercise in maritime madness.

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.