I watched The Lighthouse because the premise seemed like it might be cool and it had a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. It was sold to me as a horror drama. 0 stars. Would not recommend. At least not to anyone I'm friends with.
Spoiler alert - although not really. That would imply there's much to spoil in this film.
To start this terrible movie off, it's in black and white. Which . . . meh. OK, whatever. I made it through Sin City, the first part of the Wizard of Oz, and Citizen Kane . . . and they were all fine. It's also set with a square ratio, rather than one that fills your TV. Again . . . meh. I grew up before widescreen TVs were a thing and have enjoyed many films in this format. The director is trying to set a mood and theme. I get it. Also the sound isn't recorded all that well in parts, so it's hard sometimes to hear what people are saying in the film. That's a bit less forgivable. I think it was just sloppy (rushed) shooting. But whatevs.
It's the story of a young man with a chronic masturbation problem who gets a job on a remote light house. The only other person at the light house is an old man who is a pathological liar, dedicated amateur flatulist, and alcoholic. I guess that covers the drama. Full plot synopsis - two unlikable people masturbate and fart until very, very, very predictably, one ends up killing the other. As far as I can tell, the entire 'horror' aspect of the movie comes mostly at the end where you realize that you've wasted hours of your life that you'll never get back.
If you really, really love pretentiousness and messages that are very obvious but you think are really hard to spot - this may be a great movie for you! There's a lot of stuff that's clumsily supposed to 'make you think'. I think. Ridiculous amounts of gay subtext and sooo much coded (and some not so coded) homoeroticism between the old and young man, the lighthouse is used several times in shots to represent a phallus, it's pretty heavy handed in treatment of 'alcoholism is bad'. Plenty of reference and allusion to old Greek myths too, which should make uh . . . nobody I know excited. There was at least one prominent cinematic re-creation of a 1900s era gay artistic painting if that floats your boat. By the end of the movie sending these messages has become much more important than little things like logical consistency. Like the director really wanted to go all in on the Prometheus myth bandwagon so by the end he's doing stuff like having the young guy try to touch his hand to the burning lighthouse light (while screaming and distorting the pre-amps on the mics - because fuck you audio fidelity, that's why!) then falling down the lighthouse stairs to his (presumable) death . . . next shot he's naked and lying on rocks miles from the lighthouse with no apparent damage to his hand and having seagulls pull out his entrails - and crying.
TLDR - Pretentious artsy movie with lots of unspoken gay stuff, lots of in your face masturbation and farting, little logical consistency but somehow a completely predictable story line and zero horror.