The movie The Lighthouse (2019) is pretty bad. Most of the film focuses on the unpleasant character (Thomas Wake) played by Willem Dafoe who spends lots of time harassing the younger and handsome (according to Thomas Wake's assessment) co-worker (whose name is Thomas Howard, played by Robert Pattinson), with orders and joking comments. At a certain point in the film, when both start drinking as if there was no tomorrow, the course of events leads to a certain physical contact between the two men, evidenced by songs and dances. From that point on, the dominance-submission relationship of one character over the other is inverted quite suddenly and, in my opinion, without the support of facts. It is also difficult to justify Thomas Howard's fixation on wanting to reach the place of the lighthouse light and Thomas Wake's obstinacy in not allowing this to happen, unless approaching the relationship between both as one of dominance-submission that ends up becoming inverted. The film also shows a mermaid as part of a hallucination experienced by Thomas Howard. In an awfully brutal scene, the same character kills a seagull, out of anger or perhaps another hallucination, who knows?
Review of The Lighthouse
The Lighthouse
(I) (2019)
Dominance-submission relationship between two men taking care of a lighthouse.
5 March 2023