I do not know what is wrong with cinéphiles. They are mistaking the epidermic values of a movie with good cinema... But I cannot tell which movie is worse... «Midsommar» or this pointless thing you cannot make heads or tails of, inspired not so much in Melville or Lovecraft, but in all the bad horror movies that Los Angeles has been making after the 1970s. «The Lighthouse» takes about thirty-something minutes to make a tiring exposition concerning two men, alone with their secrets, in charge of a lighthouse, which has its own secret. All that first act is dominated by omnipresent amplified sound and gimmicky music cues, because --I repeat it again-- filmmakers seem not to trust the images they shoot, and because someone told them (from Bernard Herrmann down) that cinema without music is useless. Cheap aphorism of populist cinema with cultured pretensions... And then the secrets of all are revealed when the movie turns into a piece of chamber theater, delivered by two drunks: the endless dialogues were perhaps inspired by Melville or diaries of sailors and lighthouse keepers (as the credits claim), but to me they sounded like the verbal fencing between two crazy hags exchanging ridiculous lines of nineteenth-century melodrama, about beans, wood and nuns. While the man in charge of the lighthouse (Willem Dafoe) goes from tyrant to old queen, his slave/assistant (Robert Pattinson) hallucinates with mermaids, octopus men, Hitchcockian seagulls, storms, seaweed and whatever sea thing you can imagine. Second film by Robert Eggers, the decorator and costumer who tricked everyone with "The VVitch," his first movie, «The Lighthouse» mimics the format and black-and-white of silent films to no avail. Unless you have watched very little cinema and do not know Dreyer, you may find it fascinating. For me it is irremediably silly.