In the beginning, it coincided with the release of "Doctor Sleeper" and the reputation was weak. Many film critics took advantage of the trend to label "Lighthouse" as the soul sequel of "The Shining", especially when I saw Dafoe chasing the five parties with an axe. It is a knowing smile.
The so-called soul sequel is about its extremely depressive atmosphere shaping. Digging deeper is to enlarge the unknown, 1:1 frame, black and white tones, and a lot of close-up close-ups. The amount of information allows the audience to focus all their attention on unreliable narratives that are already shaky. This feeling is very similar to the trust game in various team building. You only need to fall back and the people behind tell you "rest assured, we will catch you", but you can't look back, but there is no sound behind you—you I think you should trust your friends, just like trusting the director’s narrative, but you hear the footsteps of them leaving in a daze, so you start to doubt whether the information you received is true and whether things will develop as you imagined; You fall, just like your husband raised an axe in "The Shining", and the five parties fought in "The Lighthouse". You either landed steadily, or fell painfully, or found yourself still standing in place after a while of dizziness. The charm of most horror/horror movies comes from this.
As a result, "The Lighthouse" is almost completely woven on half-truth and half-false lies, and the absurdity of the lies gradually deepens as the mental state of the five parties collapses. At the very beginning, Dafoe told us that the ship that received the ship would not arrive on time, which can be understood as an objective accident. Then, the mystery of the five parties’ identity, Dafoe’s self-bragged sailor’s career, a piece of character design that was originally thought to be reliable. The certainty began to be torn apart, and at this point, everything can still be explained with reasonable reasons until this scene appears.
Dafoe strongly accused the five parties of violence, but we only witnessed the plot of Dafoe chasing and killing the five parties just a minute ago. The director started telling us blatantly, "Now, you don't even need to believe what I said." It is true that false narrative is a technique or motif that has been rotten by various literary works or film and television works. However, the "Lighthouse" that has emerged from such a neat and tidy and neatly formed from the form to the spirit is still Can be regarded as a boutique. If we follow this logic and rewind forward, in fact, Dafoe has already made a hint when he first described his sailor career.
Loneliness will not cure loneliness, but will gradually make people see their original appearance. The isolated island is naturally a symbol of loneliness. Here, people naturally abandon the shackles and restrictions given to them by the world, and return to the most primitive sexual desire and possessiveness. At the same time, the director wants the audience to experience similar emotions. His method is to use the camera. The self-contradiction of language simulates the subjective feelings of the chaos of the characters in the play. Then, the sea, the legend of Cthulhu, the Greek mythology and the narrow sight of the audience are the same. Seagulls may be the only honest. Dafoe said that seagulls carry the souls of sailors-those evil and cruel sailors, and whether active or passive, the seagulls in the film have been fighting against the five parties from beginning to end, trying to tear them away. The flesh on his body, so if someone insists on changing this essay question into a multiple-choice question and let me accept the narrative of one of them, I should be on Dafoe's side.
Another visual memory point of "Lighthouse" is its strong contrast and echoing before and after-the contrast between the two people's ardent and sincere feelings after drinking and the cold attitude towards each other after waking up, which is exactly what Dafu said about the sea. At the beginning, when he painted the lighthouse, Dafu hung the five parties with a rope and called him "Rhine Dog". At the end, the five parties also led Dafu with a rope to let him learn how to bark; and when the five parties walked up to the lighthouse, that There is always an obvious conflict between light and dark. I saw a film critic's statement that I liked it. It roughly means that Wufang walked up to the lighthouse and saw it, or that he noticed not the dazzling headlights, but the endless looking around. The sea, the latter became the last straw that crushed his spirit.
Many people say that "The Lighthouse" should be defined as a feature film more than a thriller, but if this is the criterion, its script, rhythm, and theme can be improved-except for the two superb starring Acting skills (Wufang completely reversed the image of Xiao Xianrou before, as for Da Fu, it is hard to imagine that an actor in his sixties would have to fight to act the kind of buried alive scene), but if you look at it from the eyes of a thriller , It starts from a classic and masterpiece frequently produced theme, uses exquisite shooting techniques and excellent ideas to completely integrate the audience into an autistic, dark, and chaotic world. This sense of presence is for a thriller. , Is the most commendable.
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