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The Lighthouse

A review by Brooks Rich

Using quarantine to catch up on reviews that should have been posted. Here we have a film perfect for quarantine viewing. The Witch director Robert Eggers follows up that masterpiece with this dizzying insane descent into madness, mermaids, and masturbation buoyed by two of the best performances from last year. The Witch was called a New England Folktale. The Lighthouse should be called a New England Fever Dream. 

Two men are assigned with maintaining a lighthouse on a remote island in New England circa 1890. It's hard for me to describe what follows, but Eggers takes us on one of the a truly bizarre and disturbing journey. Eggers is a director that never lets his viewers relax.Like in The Witch, when we're nervous from the second the family leaves the safety of the community, we are tense the second our two characters set foot on the island. That tension doesn't stop until the screen goes to black and it says directed by Robert Eggers. 

The film is stunning. Shot in black and white, it has a strange, ethereal quality. At times it feels like a dream and at times it feels like a terrifying hallucination. Eggers doesn't give his audiences any easy answers and this film is no different. As the characters go insane, we begin to question what is real and what is a product of their terrified imagination. This is not a typical Hollywood film.

The highlight of this film are the performances of Robert Pattinson and Willem Defoe. The two are both playing crazy, but they are going about it crazy. Pattinson is playing a man who is slowly losing both his mind and his grip on reality. Defoe is playing it as a man who is cracking Up after years of seeing all kinds of things on the island. The levels of madness the two men bring play off each other well. 

This is a film for cinephiles. If you are tired of the same old Hollywood shit, then The Lighthouse is for you. Personally everything about it works for me and it's one of my favorites from last year. 

Rating: 5/5 (masterpiece)




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