“Yer fond of me lobster aint' ye? I seen it - yer fond of me lobster! Say it! Say it. Say it!”

two guys hundreds of miles offshore on a rock island cause they’re not gay?

i’m tempted to give this a 3.5 cause y’all really hyped this up so much for me and i just couldn’t vibe with it in the end. it’s good, really good actually. the uncomfortable atmosphere shows Eggers’ talent of conducting tonally overwhelming horror with bizarre elements at seemingly random intervals. feels like things happen out of nowhere, out of order, and yet this works so mesmerizingly well. orchestrated insanity and homoerotic brawling!

kept comparing it to grisly black n white horror classics like the universal monster series or Island of Lost Souls and such, and it’s such a contemplative piece on terrors past and present. a little (cinematic) history in itself. maybe also just a documentary on abuse in workplace environments. there is a lot of cursing and wrestling. also farting and feces. the Dafoe-Pattinson dyad seems to have gone through hell and back with this shoot, my dudes were living the exhaustion. 

so it’s well-acted, has beautiful expressionistic cinematography (obvsly the light(ing) is the major recurring theme) and evokes a spiraling narrative of fear and psychosis. quite funny too. gothic hauntings are my favorite but this is as far out as i’ll wade into troubled waters for them. i really struggled to stay engaged with the film for a good hour until the storm finally swept me away. lovecraftian fever dreams and tall tales of the sea sang me to a dark slumber.