Man, I've been waiting for a new Eggers movie ever since The Witch dropped.

Glad we're finally getting one.

Is the lighthouse haunted or is Robbie and Dafoe losing their minds?

Can't wait to find out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyag7lR8CPA

1) Similar to the Witch, the dialogue/accents are hard to understand without subtitles. Lots will go over your head, trust me.

2) The old aspect ratio the film is shot in makes it pretty pointless to see on a widescreen.

3) This is sooo not the kind of film you want to see with a room full of people munching on popcorn, candy, and laughing obnoxiously. Watch this joint alone, in a dark room, with subtitles on.

Luckily, this is also the kind of film that would reward a 2nd viewing.

I probably could make out only about 50% max of the words.
I left thinking it would have even worked as a silent film based on how little I understood.

>

Maybe I got lucky with my audience (even though I went to my local AMC, not really known for respectful audiences usually), but everyone was fully engrossed in the matinee I went to. Didn’t find the accents that tough to understand, and I really dug the theatricality of the monologues, which granted is something I enjoy when done well.
You definitely have to buy into it very quickly, or you’ll likely roll your eyes a lot, between the salt-drenched gruffness of the two leads (who are both great, what a year for Pattinson) and some of the magical realism aspects.

A friend of mine saw it in a micro-cinema, about 25 seats, and lamented that the one part of his experience that was a little sour was his desire to laugh, stifled by the fact no one else was laughing.

During the 2nd act, when Pattinson turns to drink and the drama cedes to comedy for a moment, I was relieved that I could laugh at his Poseidon's curse or the splatter of shit on his face once I heard the majority of people behind me (I was 4th row in a larger cinema) laughing out loud. I felt like I was in a room of people that immediately got this movie, and it was cathartic/communal. And gnashing of popcorn? That's always been movie-going, it's a bummer home theater systems have led people to not be able to block that out.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

Wish I saw this at a Drafthouse but both of the ones near me don't have it.

I need to see this again at a good theater.

really looking forward to catching this sometime... maybe soon.

Highly, highly recommended! I still haven't seen The Witch, but I doubt that'll be true much longer unless it falls off of Netflix while I'm not looking. Eggers has such a masterful hold on these characters and this setting, and what little story there is to latch on to rushes by like a gale force wind. Dafoe's Wake is a Shakespearean presence translated through a Melville fetish, and Pattinson perfectly balances his blustering poetry with a blunt, cold performance that cracks in all the right places at all the right times. The latter's rightfully been compared to Daniel Day-Lewis' performance in There Will Be Blood, and not just because he's got the moustache and the accent. He truly transforms, while Dafoe seems to be channeling his Norman Osborne into a freer, more human space.

Some could argue the Lovecraftian aspects are a bit tacked on, and those who've seen Annihilation (or actually read his most famous works, I guess) could probably see the ending coming as soon as the title card hits, but that just makes Eggers' insistence on ignoring the coherence of the story in favor of the, ahem, ever growing and expanding insight the characters build into each other and the insanity derived from their lonely, mismatched cohabitation all the better. The moment I fully gave myself to this movie was when it took a break from all the dourness to become one of the funniest movies I've seen all year; the deftness with which Eggers transmutes from a period drama to a comedy to a psychological horror is stunningly subtle and steady-handed.

It's also hard to overstate how much the 4:3 aspect ratio suits this film; it'd be hard for widescreen home televisions to ruin anything about this particular movie, but there is something very intentional about that claustrophobic aspect ratio that'll be lost as the movie transitions to streaming services, I'd think. When your eyes are filled with nothing but the screen, it lends an intensity and a closeness to every scene that I think will be lost when you're also seeing an entertainment center, a video game console, an end table or whatever in your periphery rather than an ominous lack of imagery. Anybody with an interest in the phenomenal and the psychological owes it to themselves to get to a theater and see this instant classic for themselves.

~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz