6 Reasons Why So Many People Hated The Lighthouse, One of the Decade’s Most Acclaimed Films

1.0 Introduction: The Great Divide

When Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse washed ashore, critics lauded it as a “veritable masterpiece of performance” and an “incomparable vision of Hell on Earth.” Yet, for every superlative, a wave of audience dissent rose to meet it. Viewers branded the film “narratively incoherent,” “dull and noisy,” and ultimately “chaos for chaos sake.” This stark divide was not accidental; it was meticulously engineered. The film’s most alienating qualities are the direct result of deliberate, challenging artistic choices that prioritize psychological immersion over narrative satisfaction. This analysis explores the specific filmmaking decisions that polarized audiences and created one of the decade’s most profound cinematic arguments.

2.0 The Unforgivable Sin of an Ambiguous Ending

One of the most intense criticisms leveled against The Lighthouse centers on its conclusion. For many viewers, the ending was not merely ambiguous—it was absent. The frustration was so palpable that reviews bluntly claimed the film simply did not have a proper resolution.

“it literally doesn’t have an ending”

This sentiment was echoed by those who saw the final moments as an “abstract art piece rather than a coherent conclusion,” a baffling succession of strange events that offered no payoff. But from an analytical perspective, Eggers doesn’t fail to provide an ending; he provides a mythological one. The film is steeped in allusions to figures like Prometheus and Sisyphus, characters defined by eternal punishment, not narrative closure. By ending with a Promethean image of Robert Pattinson’s character being devoured by gulls, the film offers a thematic, cyclical resolution rather than a linear, narrative one. For an audience expecting a story to be solved, this denial of clarity felt like a betrayal.

3.0 An Atmosphere Designed for Assault

While proponents praised the film’s immersive atmosphere, many viewers found the experience itself to be a grueling, two-hour assault on the senses. The world was intentionally crafted to be "ugly, claustrophobic, hermetic," with visuals that are both beautiful and relentlessly oppressive. Eggers and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke made several key technical choices to achieve this. They shot in a nearly square 1.19:1 aspect ratio, creating a sense of vertical claustrophobia that traps the characters—and the viewer—within the suffocating confines of the lighthouse tower. Furthermore, by shooting on black-and-white stock designed to emulate orthochromatic film, they created a world where reds register as black, making blood and lips appear stark, dark, and unnatural.

This visual punishment was matched by an equally aggressive soundscape. The score by Mark Korven is less a composition than a “relentless assault on the nerves,” working in concert with a sound design dominated by the constant blare of foghorns, the howl of the wind, and the “deafening, bass-heavy thrum of the lighthouse machinery.” The effect is total sensory overload, a meticulously crafted state of misery that led one reviewer to a common conclusion:

“at the end that I more appreciated what it did well and how it did it than I actually ‘enjoyed’ the film as a film.”

This approach challenges the very notion of entertainment, asking the audience to endure dread rather than simply witness it.

4.0 Authenticity as a Barrier to Entry

Another major barrier for viewers was the film’s dense and deliberately difficult language. The dialogue was not simply “old-timey”; it was a scholarly reconstruction. The Eggers brothers drew from the literary prose of Herman Melville and the authentic language found in period lighthouse keeper journals to create a unique, brine-soaked vernacular. This commitment to historical authenticity, however, came at the direct expense of clarity.

Audiences complained that the “archaic and nautical jargon” made the plot “harder to follow,” even with the aid of subtitles. This was compounded by Willem Dafoe’s gruff, cartoonishly accented delivery, which prompted one frustrated viewer to state they “couldn’t understand a word Willem Dafoe said.” Here, the film presents a classic art-house trade-off: it sacrifices audience accessibility for a deeply researched, almost academic, level of period detail, leaving many feeling intellectually stranded and disconnected from the narrative.

5.0 More an ‘Experience’ Than a Movie

Synthesizing these elements reveals the core of the audience divide: The Lighthouse functions less as a traditional film and more as an immersive psychological event. This idea is captured perfectly by the title of one IMDb review: "More an experience than comprehensible movie." The film’s greatest artistic strengths are also its biggest liabilities. The ambiguous ending, oppressive atmosphere, and incomprehensible dialogue are designed to simulate, not merely depict, a descent into madness.

Crucially, this descent is tonally schizophrenic. The film lurches wildly between grim psychological horror, Beckettian absurdity, and moments the source material describes as “gut-bustlingly hilarious.” This jarring blend of horror and dark comedy is profoundly disorienting. It denies the viewer a stable emotional footing, making the experience feel like it has no coherent story or emotional anchor. By prioritizing this chaotic “experience” over substance, Eggers asks the audience to endure the characters’ psychological collapse—a powerful artistic goal, but a difficult request for a viewer allergic to art-house cinema.

6.0 A Masterpiece of Frustration?

The elements of The Lighthouse that generated the most frustration—its mythological ending, oppressive sensory design, and literary dialogue—were not failures but intentional, masterfully executed artistic choices. Eggers succeeded in creating precisely the disorienting, challenging film he envisioned. This leaves us with a fundamental question about the contract between artist and audience. Does a film succeed if it masterfully achieves its goal of making the viewer feel isolated and insane, or is a story’s ultimate duty to provide clarity and satisfaction?