[Movies] The Lighthouse (2019)
Jan. 18th, 2020 09:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yuuagoI watched The Lighthouse last night.
It has been on my list of potential to-watch for a while, but then I heard that it received an Oscar nomination for Best Cinematography, and that made me bump it to the front of the queue.
As usual, I didn't look up much information beforehand. I had vague impressions that it was a relatively straightforward drama/historical + horror, sort of in the same vein as The Terror except as a film about two lighthouse keepers, and that it would have a mermaid or a kraken or both.
What I did not expect was a highly surreal, homoerotic, black-and-white art film about two guys going bonkers in a lighthouse, with various Greek Mythology references and a touch of eldritch horror.
It gave me a similar feeling as what I got when watching Ingmar Bergman's Persona: highly unsettled, and unsure if I actually liked it or not. It's a deeply weird film.
At any given time, it's unclear whether what's happening on screen is actually happening. There are a lot of questions about what, exactly, happened here. (And what, exactly, happened before the start of the film, too.)
I see that part of the original inspiration for it was one of Edgar Allan Poe's stories, which does explain a few things.
On the subject of cinematography, which brought me here in the first place – I hope it wins that cinematography award, because it's 100% deserved.
This is a beautiful film and it's really clear that a lot of care was taken to shoot it in such a way that the visuals would contribute to the atmosphere. It was shot with heavy use of dark shadow, which gives an incredibly claustrophobic effect. And the use of black and white film was quite a choice, because it behaves much differently than digital b&w or colour-correcting to monochrome – light shows up differently on actual b&w film than the other options, and they used the medium to its full artistic potential. That combined with the aspect ratio they shot in, and the slight graininess of everything, gave it all the look of a film made pre-1950, with the attention to cinematography that good older films had.
I would definitely recommend this to people who enjoy art films and good cinematography. I'm not sure I would generally recommend it to horror fans, though people who enjoy unnerving and surreal horror might consider giving it a try.
It has been on my list of potential to-watch for a while, but then I heard that it received an Oscar nomination for Best Cinematography, and that made me bump it to the front of the queue.
As usual, I didn't look up much information beforehand. I had vague impressions that it was a relatively straightforward drama/historical + horror, sort of in the same vein as The Terror except as a film about two lighthouse keepers, and that it would have a mermaid or a kraken or both.
What I did not expect was a highly surreal, homoerotic, black-and-white art film about two guys going bonkers in a lighthouse, with various Greek Mythology references and a touch of eldritch horror.
It gave me a similar feeling as what I got when watching Ingmar Bergman's Persona: highly unsettled, and unsure if I actually liked it or not. It's a deeply weird film.
At any given time, it's unclear whether what's happening on screen is actually happening. There are a lot of questions about what, exactly, happened here. (And what, exactly, happened before the start of the film, too.)
I see that part of the original inspiration for it was one of Edgar Allan Poe's stories, which does explain a few things.
On the subject of cinematography, which brought me here in the first place – I hope it wins that cinematography award, because it's 100% deserved.
This is a beautiful film and it's really clear that a lot of care was taken to shoot it in such a way that the visuals would contribute to the atmosphere. It was shot with heavy use of dark shadow, which gives an incredibly claustrophobic effect. And the use of black and white film was quite a choice, because it behaves much differently than digital b&w or colour-correcting to monochrome – light shows up differently on actual b&w film than the other options, and they used the medium to its full artistic potential. That combined with the aspect ratio they shot in, and the slight graininess of everything, gave it all the look of a film made pre-1950, with the attention to cinematography that good older films had.
I would definitely recommend this to people who enjoy art films and good cinematography. I'm not sure I would generally recommend it to horror fans, though people who enjoy unnerving and surreal horror might consider giving it a try.
Yuu. Fic writer & book lover. M/Canada.
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Date: 2020-01-19 11:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-19 09:48 pm (UTC)