The Lighthouse ending explained: There is no lighthouse

In 2019, Robert Eggers gave us one of the most twisted movies ever made in the history of cinema, The Lighthouse. It's a struggle of two men in a lighthouse. One is a wickie, Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson). Another is Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe), under whose supervision Winslow will be working.

People have discussed the film's ending for almost six years now if we consider the release date. The good thing about it is that it's open to interpretation for everyone.

For many, the ending has a fight where Winslow finally kills Wake and visits his darling light at the top. Maybe it was too hot to handle for Ephraim. That is why he couldn't take it for long. Or maybe, according to our interpretation, the lighthouse never existed at all.

From what we can tell, the lighthouse was just a fragment of Winslow's mind, who was just waiting to die. After he falls from the staircase, we see a dying Winslow anyway, and there’s no lighthouse in any of the frames afterward.

The Life of Chuck is one movie that explains The Lighthouse well

Maybe there are personal interpretations of the film’s ending. But Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck (2024), where Tom Hiddleston dances through life, is the best film to understand the Robert Eggers film.

While the Eggers' film isn't an Act-wise affair, it is likely that everything that was happening in the movie was going on in the mind of Winslow, just like Tom Hiddleston's Chuck.

The Life of Chuck starts as a psychological thriller. But as it moves forward, it becomes slowly clear that Chuck has created a world of his own, which is kind of comforting as that won't let him feel the pain in the real world.

For example, his teachers when he was in school, Marty Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Felicia Gordon (Karen Gillan), are sort of the center of his story the mind is playing. We get to see them in the last act of the film, which makes this clear. They are of the same age when Chuck was a kid and when we see them first when the film begins, which is with Act Three.

The same goes with Ephraim Winslow in The Lighthouse. He confesses to Wake that his real name is Thomas Howard, and Winslow was someone for whom he worked. On top of that, Winslow was a cruel man, and that is why Howard let him die during an event.

That said, if all of that was in his mind, then Thomas Wake is also a fragment of his mind, a manifestation of cruelty Howard might have witnessed in his past days. Maybe Howard wanted to kill Winslow himself but couldn't come to do it. His mind did it.

The light at the end of the tunnel

Ephraim Winslow/Thomas Howard reaching the lighthouse's top is one of the most talked-about aspects of the film. While everyone has their own interpretation, our interpretation is that the light that Winslow/Howard saw at the top of the lighthouse was "the light at the end of the tunnel." It’s a phrase many use to explain what happens after death.