![]() Because for one thing, actual, literal wankery does take place throughout the course of the film, and more than once. If that all sounds like a too-literary, top-heavy exercise in intellectual wankery over substance, fear not. ![]() The germ of Robert Eggers’s film was actually implanted by his brother Max, whose ultimately aborted efforts to adapt Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Lighthouse’, only nominally titled as such as it refers to an unfinished work, likely the troubled American genre luminary’s very last attempt to put prose to paper before his untimely demise in 1849.Īnd while all that remains from that early iteration of the project is that very same title, a distinctly Poe-like aura of turn of the century American Gothic hangs over the proceedings, while auxiliary influences ranging from Herman Melville all the way back to Greek myth are also poured in. Lovecraft is only one element in the gamey broth that Eggers has cooked up for us, and never a direct one – his influence is hinted at through the oblique appearance of tentacles and an overbearing sense of dread brought about by a madness which may or may not be nudged to further effectiveness by ancient forces lying dormant within the natural world.īut Lovecraft is only one weave in this tapestry, a tapestry whose origins can, in turn, be traced back to one of the author’s own key influences. ‘Weird Tales’ is right in many ways, being the title of the magazine in which the now-canonical (though always socio-politically problematic) early 20th century American horror author H.P. Riding high on the runaway critical success of his feminist-adjacent period chiller The Witch (2015), Eggers pulls off a triple-whammy trick that only the likes of Darren Aronovsky have managed over a sustained period of time: roping in star power and courting mainstream attention while weaving the weirdest of weird tales. For this reason alone – apart from its lovingly ‘vintage’ visual sense, the inspired potpourri of its subtextual underpinnings and a truly game effort from its two-hander cast – writer-director Robert Eggers’s second feature already sprints ahead in the race of contemporary mainstream cinema. In cinema as in all art, boredom is the worst possible offence, and when most of what’s on offer is either another steroid-pumped franchise entry or a variant of the same, the threat of glazed-over-eyes remains ever on the horizon.
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