I think that, provided you go into it knowing that it has a reputation as an out there, weirdo film, it's enjoyable enough. It looks really good, and is very atmospheric; and I can fully understand how the actors found it a difficult shoot. (They are both really good, though.)
But it's hard to say how much one can really value a movie which has the audience rushing online afterwards to work out whether it is possible to make any sense of it. (I haven't tried very hard. My son told me that it's supposed to be very Freudian, and I read something about the influence of Greek myth. Something about some painting explains one brief and particularly weird image, apparently.)
I would say the film is a bit of a cheat, though, in that the fairly early disclosure of the odd behaviour of the old dude indicates that there is likely to be an explanation coming (no matter how weird) of what he's doing up there with the light. But there isn't. All the sexual obsession stuff, be it of heterosexual or homoerotic nature, involving a mermaid (and, seemingly, a touch of tentacle porn) is, as far as I can tell, left without any explanation at all. And really, there is a key sequence - perhaps the climatic one - where I think the film pushes so hard on the feeling that it ought to be making some kind of intuitive or subconscious sense, but isn't at all, that it diminishes what went before it.
I haven't ever watched Mulholland Drive, which I think is supposed to be David Lynch's most dream like film*, but I have a vague recollection that he says he just grabs ideas from a process of meditative free association. Eggers seems to do a far more calculated form of weirdness, where (if you care to investigate) you can see where some ideas come from. But I wish he would do something a bit more conventional. (I did enjoy this more than The Witch, though.)
* perhaps I should say, except for Eraserhead, which I think is just like an outright nightmare version of fears of a young guy getting his girlfriend pregnant
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