What in the world....
It's been two days since I watched THE LIGHTHOUSE and I'm not sure I can say if I liked it or not. It's boring as hell, fascinating, incredibly well acted, confounding, scatological, obsessed with bodily fluids of every variety, kind of cool, incredibly stupid and kind of hypnotic.
Well that about wraps it up...
Robert Pattinson is excellent as the young new lighthouse attendant serving as workman to Willem Dafoe's captain Thomas Wake.
As the film opens in all its black & white glory, the two men are arriving for a month long, secluded tenure maintaining the light house.
To say the island seems Godforsaken seems like an understatement. Other than Seagull crap (here we go with the scat angle again) there's not much to look at.
The living conditions are early American Squalor. Their personal hygiene is debatable.
Like Jack Torrance in "The Shining", they are stuck in their living conditions for a long time. Unlike Jack, there's no Overlook Hotel to wander through.
Whatever is in the top of the lighthouse, the Captain has no intention of letting his steward see it.
Is this a black comedy or a tortured descent into madness? Who are these men, really? Are the horrors within visions or memories?
Don't look to Writer/Director Robert Eggers for answers. Just as he did with 2015's "The Witch", he displays real talent for creating atmosphere, but no desire to populate the space with conventional story telling.
I feel kind of like I did after watching Adam Sandler's dramatic breakout in "Uncut Gems", deserving of a t-shirt saying I SURVIVED THE LIGHTHOUSE.
What I am sure is that Dafoe is his usual brilliant self, sprouting limericks or a mouth full of dirt, he demands your attention. Pattinson is far beyond expectations and now I see how he can carry a dramatic new Batman/Bruce Wayne film. He goes toe-to-toe in a mad, drunken dance with Dafoe.
Certainly one of the strangest films of the year, I'm not sure I'll get that blaring drone of the lighthouse horn out of my mind for a long time.
It's the most boring film I've given a B- in a very long time, but damned if I'm not still trying to decipher its meaning days later...
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