The Lighthouse Ending Explained [SPOILER!]

SPOILER ALERT: the following article contains massive spoilers, including the ending. If you have not yet seen the movie, proceed at your own risk, or better, come back to this article later!

Two lighthouse keepers try to maintain their sanity while living on a remote and mysterious New England island in the 1890s.

SPOILERS AHEAD

The Lighthouse Plot Summary and Synopsis

In the late 19th century, Ephraim Winslow serves a contract job as a wickie for a month on an isolated island off the coast of New England, under the supervision of the island’s longtime keeper, Thomas Wake. In his quarters, Winslow discovers a small scrimshaw of a mermaid and keeps it in his jacket.

Wake immediately proves to be very demanding, assigning Winslow increasingly taxing jobs such as emptying chamber pots, painting the lighthouse, and carrying heavy kerosene containers up the stairs, while forbidding him access to the lantern room; Winslow observes that every evening, Wake secretly ascends the lighthouse and disrobes before the light. During his stay on the island, Winslow begins to hallucinate sea monsters and logs floating in the sea, and masturbates to the mermaid on the scrimshaw.

He also continues to observe Wake’s strange ritual and is bothered by a one-eyed gull that Wake tells him not to kill, as he believes that gulls are reincarnated sailors. One evening while dining, Wake reveals to Winslow that his previous wickie died after losing his sanity, while Winslow reveals that he is a former timberman from Maine seeking a new trade.

The day before his scheduled departure, Winslow discovers a dead gull inside the cistern, bloodying its water. Winslow is again bothered by the one-eyed gull; he brutally kills it in anger. The wind drastically changes direction and a violent storm hits the island.

Winslow and Wake spend the night getting drunk, and the storm rages through the next morning, preventing the relief ferry meant to pick up Winslow from arriving. As Winslow empties the chamber pots, he notices a body washed up on the shore and discovers that it is a mermaid, which awakens and howls at him. He flees back to the cottage, where Wake informs him that the storm has spoiled their rations, and that new ones will not arrive for weeks.

The pair unearth a crate at the lighthouse’s base that supposedly contains reserve rations, but contains only bottles of gin. In the following days, as the storm continues to rage, Winslow and Wake drink most of the gin, alternating between moments of intimacy and hostility. One night, Winslow tries unsuccessfully to steal the lantern room keys from Wake as he sleeps and contemplates stabbing him. He later hallucinates a lobster trap containing the one-eyed head of Wake’s previous wickie. Winslow confesses to Wake that his real name is Thomas Howard and that he assumed the identity of the real Ephraim Winslow, his foreman who died in an accident Howard purposefully neglected to stop.

Wake chases Howard down, accusing him of “spilling his beans” and destroys their only dory with an axe; once incapacitated, however, Wake claims that it was Howard who chased him and destroyed the dory.

With no alcohol left, the two begin drinking a concoction of turpentine and honey, while the storm worsens and starts flooding the cottage.

The next morning, Howard finds Wake’s soiled logbook, in which Wake has criticized him as drunk and incompetent and recommended he be sacked without pay. The two men argue, and Howard attacks Wake while hallucinating the mermaid, the real Winslow, and Wake as a Proteus-like figure. Howard beats Wake into submission and takes him to the hole at the base of the lighthouse to bury him alive. Wake curses Howard as he is buried, wishing him a “Promethean fate.” Howard takes the keys to the lantern room, but Wake frees himself and strikes Howard with the axe.

Howard disarms Wake and kills him before ascending the lighthouse. In the lantern room, the Fresnel lens opens to Howard, who reaches in and violently screams in distortion before slipping and falling down the lighthouse steps.

The Lighthouse Ending

Sometime later, a barely-living Howard lies naked on the rocks with a damaged eye as a flock of gulls peck at his exposed bowels.

Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0).