The Lighthouse (2019)

Beautifully framed, high-contrast black-and-white misty seascapes and a bunch of tight zooms on a grizzly, crazy-faced, pirate-talking Willem Dafoe? Need I go any further? You know this is peak cinema.

It's the late 1800s. Dafoe and sparkly-vampire Robert Pattinson are dropped off on a salty New England rock to work a laborious and unthankful 4-week shift at the live-in off-shore lighthouse. Dafoe is the man in charge, a bitter and authoritarian man of the sea, while Pattinson is the quiet, rule-abiding apprentice. Dafoe takes the lighthouse for himself, and assigns all of the other awful work to Pattinson.

They work in shifts, with partial overlap for generally strained, accusative conversation over a simple daily evening meal. Rather than start off normal and get weird, it starts weird and gets batshit. Right from the start, and all throughout, each story that either character tells about himself is directly contradicted in a not-too-future story. The characters are developed rapidly and fully, and undeveloped with equal haste and completeness.

They get through the whole 4-weeks relatively uneventfully. It's the last night that's the doozy; a squall arrives, and a powerful madness sets in. From that point, it's intentionally unclear which, if either, character is still grounded in reality, and to what degree. It's also intentionally unclear how much time has passed, or is passing. They accuse each other back and forth of having gone mad. All signs point to the affirmative.

Dafoe is a man who was sent to earth to grace us with with the most powerfully engrossing soliloquies we could ever hope for, and his casting here could not be more perfect. Pattinson, a sparkling vampire who hammed it up in two of David Cronenberg's worst films, absolutely rocks it as Dafoe's less well-spoken foil. I would gladly watch another two hours of these two bickering in a shanty.

A smidge of surreality sneaks in, with no particularly well-defined boundaries between reality, fantasy, and hallucination. In the end, we don't really know who they were, and we don't really know what became of them. But, oh, what a good time we had watching them do whatever they've done!

Hot on the heels of this masterpiece, Robert Eggers (writer/director of The VVitch) would again lean on cool, moody, high-contrast black-and-white scenery and grizzly old soliloquizing Dafoe to try to rescue his crummy real-estate horror film, which would inexplicably earn 10 times more than The Lighthouse despite utter inferiority.