My spoiler-free review of "The Lighthouse"
Posted: November 2nd, 2019, 12:19 pm
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
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
