A24

The Lighthouse: Stormy Weather, Madness on the Horizon

Jeremy BeckReviews
Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe in Robert Eggers' "The Lighthouse".

A punishing movie whose bits of greatness are obscured by a fog of auteurist pretension, The Lighthouse is a deeply frustrating experience, a tantalizing work that defies explanation and categorization. It defies enjoyment too; as technically impressive and formidably confident as it may be, it isn’t much fun to watch. But it does carry a genuine personality, the imprint of a director who refuses to sacrifice his bizarre vision for the sake of more quotidian values like accessibility. Or, you know, coherence.

That director is Robert Eggers, whose first feature, the terrific horror movie The Witch, blended creeptastic folk-story terror with silky filmmaking craft. It also featured characters speaking in period-specific dialect, a trick Eggers repeats here, though the setting has been bumped up by a few centuries to the late 1800s. The screenplay, which Eggers wrote with his brother Max, is laden with old-timey jargon—“aye” in place of “yes”, “ye” instead of “you”, etc.—which enhances the film’s already-ornate degree of detail. Assuming, of course, you can understand what the hell they’re saying. Read More

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The Farewell: Honesty Is the West’s Policy

Jeremy BeckReviews
Awkwafina and others in Lulu Wang's "The Farewell"

The Farewell might have been a minor movie, if it didn’t plainly house such major talents. With its gentle tone and delicate sense of scale, it’s so intimate, it could have verged on flimsy. But writer-director Lulu Wang, making her second feature, invests the melancholy story with grace notes of lyricism that give it some stylistic heft. She’s also found the perfect star in Awkwafina, the rapper and comedienne who here makes a seamless transition to more somber material. It’s a heavy story told with a beautifully light touch.

The movie opens with a title card that reads “based on an actual lie”, establishing both its autobiographical bona fides—Awkwafina’s Billi is in many ways a stand-in for Wang—and its cheeky wit. But the falsehood at its center does more than just drive the slender plot; it becomes the foundation on which Wang builds the film’s intriguing explorations of culture, geography, and identity. And The Farewell, despite its narrow scope and quiet bearing, ends up operating on multiple levels. It’s a human melodrama that doubles as an empathetic treatise on humanity. Read More

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Midsommar: A Vacation to Paradise, But Darkness Looms

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jack Reynor and Florence Pugh in Ari Aster's "Midsommar"

Toxic relationships have rarely faced as brutal a reckoning as the one visited upon the central couple in Midsommar, the breakup film to end all breakup films. Consistently ravishing, frequently mesmerizing, and occasionally exasperating, this horror whatsit from Ari Aster fixes on a festering union, the pus that oozes from its wounds slowly morphing into nightmare fuel. With Hereditary, Aster transformed a family’s hellish history into a gateway to literal Hell. Now with Midsommar, he’s turned his precise, pitiless eye to a doomed romance, exposing every crack in its fetid underpinning. Some directors might seize on the concept of attractive people taking a European idyll as the chance to tell a beautiful love story. This is a death story.

Still a beautiful one, though. Most of Midsommar takes place in Sweden (shooting was held in Hungary), in a bucolic paradise whose natural loveliness makes it the perfect camouflage for the inevitable suffering to come. It’s a land of warm, inviting colors: rippling green grass, snowy white gowns, a cheery yellow temple whose simple architecture seems to have been plucked from a book of fairy tales. There are slender trees with spangled leaves, and vast meadows full of swaying flowers. It’s heaven on earth, a rejuvenating escape from the persistent recognition that hell is other people. Read More

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High Life: Entering the Void, High-Strung and Horny

Jeremy BeckReviews
Robert Pattinson in Claire Denis's "High Life".

The spaceship has a garden. Somewhere, amid the instrument panels and the spartan bunks and the anti-gravity suits, there is a verdant room full of plants, moss, and dirt. It’s as if the astronauts, saddened by the prospect of leaving Earth behind, insisted on bringing a bit of earth along with them.

This contrast—between the personal and the fantastical, between presence and absence, between flowering life and merciless death—is emblematic of High Life, Claire Denis’ strange, frustrating, beguiling new film. Part sci-fi thriller, part philosophical meditation, it is always challenging, often boring, and occasionally mesmerizing. Read More

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Climax: Trip Like Nobody’s Watching

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from Gaspar Noé's "Climax".

Some movies climb the walls, but in Climax, the walls blur into the ceiling and the floor. In this ambitious and enervating whatsit from the French-Argentine provocateur Gaspar Noé, the camera floats and swirls and glides, taking delirious flight through the air as bodies writhe before it in blissed-out ecstasy and unhinged agony. At one point, it becomes unclear whether the characters are vertical or horizontal, and they’re surely tripping too hard to tell the difference. It’s a dazzling visual achievement, which makes it all the more frustrating that Climax is, well, a Gaspar Noé film, which means that its technical audacity is marshaled in the service of cardboard characters, repugnant themes, and a story that is by turns skeletal and grotesque. Few directors have labored so much, and with such evident skill, to produce art that means so little.

Following the relentless banality of Love, a 135-minute borefest whose notion of boldness was to slather a dozen explicit sex scenes on top of its monotonous chronicle of a doomed relationship, Climax finds Noé returning to the lurid violence and operatic camerawork of his prior two features, Irreversible and Enter the Void. That’s for the best; despite its surfeit of stimulated genitals and spurting fluids, Love found Noé out of his element, straining to tell a character-driven story with a minimum of visual embellishment. (Well, relative minimum; as with Enter the Void, Love featured a POV shot of a penis ejaculating inside a vagina.) He’s far more comfortable trafficking in ornate brutality, which he likes to turn arty with pounding music and sweeping long takes. Working again with his regular cinematographer, Benoît Debie, Noé takes the ostensibly flat setting of Climax—an abandoned high school in France—and, with unflinching verve, transforms it into a hellish landscape of quaking terror, the Parisian equivalent of the Overlook Hotel. Read More

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