Danny Steur’s review published on Letterboxd:
This review may contain spoilers.
“Thou art a symbol and a sign
To Mortals of their fate and force.” - Lord Byron, ‘Prometheus’
The terror of the in-between, of the blurring of boundaries, of the destabilizing of what we know to be true. Every ostensibly stable binary seems to fall apart, as previously separate categories start to intermingle: master and slave, reality and unreality, sanity and insanity, truth and myth, Thomas and Thomas. The open sea has always been a symbol of liminality, of in-betweenness, but here we are on firm ground, on this rock - but nevertheless we speak the language of seamen.
A movie that seems utterly tactile, that makes all the wet, salt, sweat and dirt tangible, partially through the grainy texture of the image - this uses a beautiful orthochromatic aesthetic, invoking the look and feel of 19th-century photography (and holy fuck is it gorgeous to look at). But all this physicality is shot through with the spiritual; the intangible bleeds into - forces itself into - the tangible. Pattinson screams and the 35mm film, the analog, physical carrier of images and sounds, seems unable to capture the light that falls onto it, even the sound starts to corrupt - pushing the limits of the physical, the real, the sane. Whereas mythology and superstition used to inform our truths and actions, now what was true has become myth. “There is enchantment in the light.” We best not play with it, lest our liver be pecked out by vultures - or gulls. Unholy creatures.
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