My spoiler-free review of "The Lighthouse"

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NicodemustheSage
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My spoiler-free review of "The Lighthouse"

Post by NicodemustheSage »

I saw this last night, and, as after a really good drunken binge, I had to throw up:

One of the most batshit-insane acid trips of a movie I have EVER seen. It ain't pleasant, and there are no comfortable answers. But, like a mad sailor does a heaving sea, I may just love this film.

More [spoiler-free] texture: "The Lighthouse" is masterpiece of nineteenth-century mental illness and suffocatingly paranoid demented incel claustrophobia. It's a Stanley Kubrick film by way of a Terence Malick movie filtered through an Orson Wells production on acid. It was trippy, unpleasant, visceral, evocative, random, unhinged, raw, breathless, scabrous, and lunatic... Melville, Hemingway, and Poe, corroded splintered and turned over, like a shallow grave, by a malarial Hunter S. Thompson. "The Lighthouse" is swamped, wracked, and wrecked by astonishing visuals, ominous audiovisual portents, and sea-chanty Shakespearean monologues delivered within a fever-dream crucible of Lovecraftian psychological horror. This is the sort of nightmare that probably drove poor old mad Quint from "Jaws" to poop his boat inside the gullet of a vengeful great white, laughing all the while as he was sucked down into the maw of Leviathan. If Edison had started with this sort of film, and not sunrises and city streets and railroad footage, the entire medium would have been burned and condemned like the young women of Salem. It left me battered, senseless, skewered, drowned, and gutted.

https://youtu.be/Hyag7lR8CPA
I remain, as always.

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Shrykespeare
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Re: My spoiler-free review of "The Lighthouse"

Post by Shrykespeare »

Awesome review, Nico. Doubt I'll ever see it, but I love reading your reviews.
Happy 60th birthday Jet Li! (4/26/23)

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ARoode
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Re: My spoiler-free review of "The Lighthouse"

Post by ARoode »

This was filmed in Nova Scotia in the Yarmouth area. I've got a cottage near by. I wasn't around for any of it but apparently Willem Dafoe was a local fixture and approachable. This was also one of the films featured at the Atlantic Film Festival here in Halifax. Dafoe flew back into town to be a part of it which I think is great. I really enjoyed the film and it's descent into madness, although given that we're all going stir crazy now in quarantine... :shock:
"Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment." -- Dag Hammarskjold

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numbersix
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Re: My spoiler-free review of "The Lighthouse"

Post by numbersix »

Small world. My sister-in-law is from Halifax

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ARoode
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Re: My spoiler-free review of "The Lighthouse"

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Haha, well now you've got two options for places to stay if you are on vacation :)
"Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment." -- Dag Hammarskjold

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