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