After wowing audiences with his feature-length debut The Witch, writer/director Robert Eggers takes a big swing with The Lighthouse – a film with more specifications and fewer actors. His latest film connected with many (our own Shahbaz Khayambashi loved it at TIFF), but it didn’t work for me. I can appreciate the dedication of Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe (which translates into their memorable performances), but the actors are wasted on a movie that’s too muddled…
When Robert Eggers appeared on the cinematic scene with The Witch at 2015’s Sundance Film Festival, he exposed untold new ways to tell horror stories. So, what can someone who has already reinvented a genre do to follow up such a work? Eggers decided to use a similar formula—mainly the research of authentic historical documents that went into the screenplay’s creation of horror—to tell a brand-new story. The results are great.
With The Witch, Robert Eggers showed the world that there were untold, new ways to tell horror stories. So, what can someone who has already reinvented a genre do as a follow up? Eggers decided to tell a new story based on the research of horrific authentic historical documents, and it works.
TIFF returns for another year, pushed along by their Tuesday announcement of gala and special presentation films. This first slate has the same level of films that frequently find their way into the earliest announcement: films that will eventually be nominated for Oscars, or be ignored for Oscars, or find their way into hot take articles about how they should have been nominated for Oscars.