Earlier this week, I watched The Lighthouse for the first time. Only six years late to a film that I’ve wanted to watch since it was originally released in cinemas, I finally took the plunge in order to hear Robert Pattinson doing a silly voice ahead of seeing Mickey 17, a film in which Robert Pattinson does a silly voice. He does a lot of those.
Robert Eggers’ maritime character study defies categorisation and invites interpretation. Willem Dafoe’s Thomas Wake and Pattinson’s Ephraim Winslow navigate their month manning an offshore lighthouse, but not everything is as it seems.
Amazon Prime Spoils The Lighthouse’s Twist
Both Wake and Winslow have their secrets, some of which we never quite come to fully comprehend. But the biggest twist in the tale is that Ephraim isn’t who he says it is. He has stolen his dead foreman’s identity and is looking for a new start as a wickie. But Amazon spoiled it.
I paused The Lighthouse halfway through as my daughter woke up. After I’d settled her and made a quick brew, I sat back down on my sofa ready to watch the rest of the movie. Only, Prime’s x-ray feature told me that there were two characters in this scene. Thomas Wake (Dafoe), it said, and Thomas Howard (Pattinson). Great.
I knew it couldn’t be wrong. This is a system powered by IMDB. If it had tagged both actors as playing Thomas Wake, I would have assumed it was an error. But no, this was clearly two different characters. And 15 minutes later, Winslow revealed his truth and spilled the beans.
Now this isn’t a film that relies on its twist. The twist doesn’t tie the plot together. It’s an unexpected turn of events and helps you to understand the motivations behind Pattinson’s character. Except, in my case, it wasn’t unexpected. Knowing that Winslow was lying didn’t ruin the film for me, but I’m gutted I couldn’t experience his confession as Eggers intended. It changed the moment from one of shock to one of understanding.
There’s plenty I didn’t know, of course. I didn’t know that Winslow was Howard’s foreman at his previous logging job. I didn’t know that Howard had let him die. It was still a powerful moment, but it was a moment I’d been expecting.
Streaming Services Hold Too Much Power Over Us
It’s frustrating that this could have been so easily avoided. If you could turn off the x-ray overlay, I would have done so years ago. It doesn’t offer me anything that I can’t easily Google, and it spoils films in instances like this. I’m certain this has happened to me before as well, although my memory fails me when I try to recall the specific example. I just hope nobody watching Se7en gets the killer spoiled for them when Kevin Spacey shows up as a photographer. Sorry if I spoiled it for you there.
This unfortunate error is one of the reasons people are abandoning streaming services. Prices are increasing, adverts are invading our paid-for movies, and then you get issues like this which are the result of being reliant on machines. A human identifying the actors in each scene wouldn’t just read the end credits and superimpose them over every scene, they’d acknowledge that, at this point, the audience only knows Pattinson as Winslow.
I recently bought Godzilla Minus One on 4K Blu-Ray. Mostly it’s because it’s a cracking film that I wanted a physical copy of, but also because I couldn’t rely on any streaming services to show it correctly, if at all. Subtitles aren’t always available on streaming services, so I might have sat through the entire film not understanding a word of conversation. That’s if the film was on any of my subscriptions, which it wasn’t. These services also engage in shady practices, removing films from your monthly sub and only allowing you to buy them outright when there’s a sequel on the horizon. Physical media has none of these pitfalls.
This may strike you as a minor gripe, especially seeing as The Lighthouse’s twist wasn’t particularly important in the grand scheme of things. But it’s yet another grievance I have with streaming services, which were once convenient and are now a worse, more expensive version of cable. I’ll stick to buying Blu-rays from now on.
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