This psychological thriller about two lighthouse keepers in the 1890s is weird but beautiful, much lauded for its cinematography as well as its other features.
Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe are the leads, going crazy in isolation in Nova Scotia in awful weather (apparently the weather was indeed awful during the shoot).
Director Robert Eggers co-wrote the script with his brother Max Eggers and is said to have described the plot the same way in every interview: "Nothing good can happen when two men are trapped alone in a giant phallus."
The director of photography Jarin Blaschke's work not only earned him an Oscar nomination, but he also won the Spotlight award from his peers in the American Society of Cinematographers, among many kudos. The filming technique was too complex to explain here and the end result is high contrast black and white with an aspect ratio of 1.19:1 (for the mathematicians among us, that's almost square) in order to give an added layer of claustrophobia. For comparison's sake, old fashioned television was 4:3 and current TVs are 16:9.
I'm streaming the eerie score by Mark Korven on Apple Music and I see it's available on Spotify and other outlets.
Pattinson was last in these pages for Cosmopolis and Dafoe for At Eternity's Gate. I haven't seen work by the others.
Rotten Tomatoes' critics' average is 90% and its audiences' 72. We wouldn't go that far but the photography buffs among you might want to stream it, as it's available now (we saw it January 21). You'll need the room as dark as possible but there are some hints of the Eggers brothers' history with horror productions so don't watch it right before you're trying to sleep!
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