Random Blu-Ray Roulette: No. 58

"Goddamn your farts! You smell like piss, you smell like jism, like rotten dick, like curdled foreskin, like hot onions fucked a farmyard shit house!".

Usually, when I find a quotable movie, it's a comedy - like This is Spinal Tap or Monty Python and the Holy Grail. With The Lighthouse, it is a different sort of quotable where Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson bellow and blast at each other in 1800s English - but it is more than Thomas Wake and Ephraim Winslow hating each other's guts for nearly 2 hours. The Lighthouse has an angry, isolated and incendiary mood, and remember this came out in the twilight of COVID. If anything, The Lighthouse arrived at precisely the right time when psychological distress was amok from country to country. But take one look at Robert Eggers's second feature and think: "Is it more than two men going mad in a lighthouse?" - about how humans cannot function in a confined space for a prolonged period, or sexual frustration and stress.

It's a film with many layers and can't be pigeonholed into a genre. The closest is perhaps experimental, and even then, that's demeaning. I never thought it was alienating - despite the language barriers or Wake and Winslow's drunken and intolerable behaviour, The Lighthouse is weirdly relatable about the darkest human suffering. I would go as far as to say it is one of the best depicted on screen, and even if this isn't your thing, you can't deny The Lighthouse's attention to every brick and mortar on this godforsaken hell pit, or Jarin Blaschke's boxed in shots of the island. The Lighthouse is my favourite Robert Eggers film and he has a fine career ahead of him - he is an extraordinary craftsman, at a place where he surrounds himself with the best of the industry - Dafoe and Pattinson, Blaschke, Mark Kovan's blaring score. I love it.

Next up: Sherlock Jr. (1924)