THE LIGHTHOUSE (2019)

A mood piece for a very very bad mood.  Writer/director Robert Eggers followed his surprise debut success in THE WITCH/’15 with this even more tightly controlled commercial under-achiever.  (His quantum leap into big budgets, THE NORTHMAN, due any moment.)  At heart,  a late-19th century two-hander for Willem Dafoe’s Old Salt Lighthouse keeper and new assistant Robert Pattinson, stuck with each other for an uncompromising four-week stint of revolting meals, maintenance and forced close company.  But when a missed relief boat of supplies (and a personnel swap?) leaves the pair literally at sea, drifting-in-place past endurance, deteriorating mental & physical condition, exacerbated by alcohol (rum laced with peyote?) and stir-crazed co-dependency, tips over into outbursts of mayhem and madness.  Using period film techniques & lenses on tricky light-resistant monochrome stock (as if panchromatic film hadn’t replaced orthochromatic a hundred years ago), the ultra-narrow 1.17-to-1 framing ratio* gives a mesmerizingly eerie, haunted look & texture to the men's work, fights & drunken revels.  You won’t know exactly what’s going on at times, but the bromantic loathing (like an all-male Strindbergian Dance of Death) and bleakly comic terror is consistently involving until Eggers turns a bit batty with hallucinogenic trappings and monstrous visions.

DOUBLE-BILL: As mentioned, THE WITCH.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-witch-2015.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  (WARNING!: Feel free to ignore the following boring material.)  *Eggers not entirely alone using the nearly square 1.17-to-1 frame ratio to rachet up claustrophobia.  This aspect ratio never more than a bastard compromise, a function of the initial silent-to-sound transition.  But only in the sound-on-film process FOX popularized.  Sticking a soundtrack on the left-hand side of the frame unintentionally cropped what had been a 1.37-to-1 image, leaving it a bit unbalanced since just the left-hand side got clipped.  Over at Warner Brothers, where sound-on-disc in use, the film image remained unaffected, if only for a couple of years.  By the time everyone switched over to various sound-on-film systems, a compensated image was balanced with slightly letter-boxed printing on 35mm returning to a standardized 1.37-to-1.  (TV and 16mm more commonly 1.33-to-1.  Got that?)  BUT when the initial transfer of some Early Talkies and many, many silent films was originally made, the copiers simply ran the old film strip, which often had image covering the entire emulsion (sometimes right over the perforations) thru machines with letterbox aperture gates designed for the new standard, unintentionally cropping image on ALL sides.  Thanks to lost silent & Early Talkie negatives, you still often encounter this frame amputation, particularly noticeable in close up with actors’ heads trimmed at the top.