THE LIGHTHOUSE (2019)—Lie Back, Keep Calm, and Think of Nova Scotia

Cinema of Cruelty (Movies for Masochists)

On this week’s annotated deep dive, The Cultists Present Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse (2019). Wildly experimental in both its technical ambitions (a full black and white feature film shot entirely with camera equipment from the 1910s—1930s); its cast (a complete roster of only two people); and it’s narrative arc (a set of lighthouse keepers who may or may not be loosing touch with reality, all while they may or may not be experiencing supernatural encounters with Greco-Roman sea gods), The Lighthouse is a film that demands a lot from its audience. And yet embedded among all the angry gulls, the slithering tentacles, and the pounding rain, might just lie a surrealist masterpiece.

(Annotated deep dives = The Folklore of the Sea: seafaring superstitions, pre-Victorian mermaid vaginas, and other water-based lore; Promethean myth cycles; and a break down of the film's technical components, such as the light spectrum limitations of those sweet early Bausch en Lomb camera lenses.)

Episode safeword: "reality"