☆☆☆☆
"Abandon all hope, ye who enter here" is from Dante's Inferno, but it might as well be a line from The Lighthouse, perhaps spoken by Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe), the bushy-bearded, squinty-eyed salty sailor who's the "wickie" in charge of a remote lighthouse on a tiny rock in the middle of a desolate, angry sea of nothingness.
Wake and young Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) begin a four-week stint at the lighthouse as the movie begins, and almost immediately we sense we are in weird sort of horror territory, a throwback to the expressionist masters of the silent era, shot in an extreme square aspect ratio of 1.19:1, which heightens the claustrophobia and discomfort.
Even though there's something really weird going on, it takes The Lighthouse a little while to get there as it settles into the rhythms of its hyper-masculine characters and hints at a deep and bizarre fantasy world within. Director Robert Eggers (who wrote the film with Max Eggers) is setting up bizarre fever dream filled with striking, shocking, horrifying imagery and hints of something ethereal and mythic. After a while, nothing in The Lighthouse can be trusted, even these two people.
This weird, unsettling horror-fantasy is more akin to a Poe short story (allegedly it was loosely inspired by Poe's final writing), and is certainly something to be seen, as are Pattinson and especially Dafoe, who create indelible characters in a film you won't easily forget -- no matter how hard you try. And you will try.
Viewed Dec. 6, 2019 -- DVD
Wake and young Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) begin a four-week stint at the lighthouse as the movie begins, and almost immediately we sense we are in weird sort of horror territory, a throwback to the expressionist masters of the silent era, shot in an extreme square aspect ratio of 1.19:1, which heightens the claustrophobia and discomfort.
Even though there's something really weird going on, it takes The Lighthouse a little while to get there as it settles into the rhythms of its hyper-masculine characters and hints at a deep and bizarre fantasy world within. Director Robert Eggers (who wrote the film with Max Eggers) is setting up bizarre fever dream filled with striking, shocking, horrifying imagery and hints of something ethereal and mythic. After a while, nothing in The Lighthouse can be trusted, even these two people.
This weird, unsettling horror-fantasy is more akin to a Poe short story (allegedly it was loosely inspired by Poe's final writing), and is certainly something to be seen, as are Pattinson and especially Dafoe, who create indelible characters in a film you won't easily forget -- no matter how hard you try. And you will try.
Viewed Dec. 6, 2019 -- DVD
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