"Goddamn your farts!"

A perfect encapsulation of cabin fever, Robert Eggers delivers yet again and proves he's one of the finest directors working today with his maddening and darkly hilarious isolation tale 'The Lighthouse,' a film I've been waiting a long while for that certainly didn't disappoint. Propelled by two incredible and sparring performances by Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, it's an incredible blend of historical accuracy and mythology, drawing on realistic dialogue and quirks mixed with haunting tales of the sea while utilizing lots of enjoyable archetypal aspects one would expect from this type of story and setting - the beards, the knitted sweaters, the long pipes, the multitude of seagulls. It's a film that's richly inviting and particularly mysterious; I was unsure where it would go throughout yet the connections, parallels and twists certainly delivered enough without feeling tired or too extraneous, leading up to one haunting final shot with wild implications for the film as a whole.

The technical aspects here are stellar across the board, but that's usually a given with Eggers' work - the screenplay is brilliance, dialogue that's easy to understand but practical given the time period and profession the men find themselves in. The cinematography is great, with the moody isolation and slow-growing unhinged nature of the characters assisted even further by the black and white utilization of the entire picture. The score is also incredible, evoking that same epic, unsettling feeling that his previous film 'The Witch' elicits. I also loved the iconography (particularly the mermaid statue) and overall imagery on display, with some uncomfortable moments spliced throughout that add further to the question of what's really going on and whether one (or both) of the lead characters are going completely insane (or have they always been?) This is another hit from Eggers and I'm already heavily looking forward to his next production.