From its mucky, grainy B&W academy ratio cinematography to off-the-wall acting by two of the most distinguished faces in Hollywood, Robert Eggers' The Lighthouse is one of the most original American films I've seen in quite a while. Eggers one-ups his great debut, The Witch, in terms of formalist filmmaking, originality and ambition.
OK. Two men cooped up to keep the lighthouse going, on an island (the rock as it is referred to) surrounded by stormy sea, for two hour running time, you'd think it would be an all formalist, all talk, My Dinner with André style snorefest. Not so. In this two-men stranded on an island set up, the elder is a bearded, flatulent sea man, Wake (Willem Dafoe), and the rookie is Winslow (Robert Pattinson), running away from his troubled lumberjack past. Wake soon exercises his stern authority over the young man. So Winslow is burdened with extreme physical, day-to-day chores - bringing up the coals in a wheelbarrow in a rocky, muddy hill, cleaning their cavernous cabin, maintaining the gears and wheels of the lighthouse. He also has to content with Wake's noisy bodily functions and general below-hygiene standards in close living proximity and also crippling loneliness.
But Eggers wastes no time plunging Wake and Winslow into cabin fever induced, lust deprived hallucinations and madness. The men's backstories figure less into the film as they devolve into the nights of binge drinking, ugliest shitfaced free-fall soon enough. There's gonna be a mermaid with fishy vagina. There's gonna be tentacles. There's gonna be a severed head filled with crabs. Seeing the giant revolving light on top of the lighthouse becomes the ultimate goal for Winslow, since it is forbidden to him - only Wake has the key to the entrance all to himself.
The Lighthouse is a crazy hallucinogenic trip that is extremely original. The two actor's physiognomy, Dafoe's troll-like, gangly body and posture and bushy beards (right out of Van Gogh's paintings) and Pattinson's bulging eyes and angular face, is very well used. There are many unforgettable imageries. The Lighthouse is a quite unique movie watching experience.
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