Andrew Draper’s review published on Letterboxd:
Saw at Lincoln Square with Skye. This was the time the staff directed us to the wrong theater and we sat through a whole mess of trailers before the Warner Bros logo came up, the aspect ratio didn't change, and we belatedly realized we were about to watch Joker. Fortunately, we found the right theater and were in time to watch another set of trailers, and then, finally, this movie.
Description-defying, eyeball-ravishing, claustrophobic and probably misanthropic, sanity-testing. Sometimes just gross. Top-shelf acting showcase for Defoe and Pattinson.
As with Midsommar, I really respect the distinctive sophomore-feature energy. Obviously everyone was really looking forward to what Eggers would do next. I'm sure there were a lot of hopes that it would be another horror film. I don't know how many of those fans were satisfied by this. For myself, I am in a kind of stunned awe at Eggers' evident determination to make whatever kind of movie he felt like making, with the utterly predictable result that this is even less like a conventional horror film than The Witch (by the way... that was still not particularly conventional!).
If this was in prose instead of film, just a few sentences of exposition would turn it into the kind of off-brand story by Arthur Conan Doyle or Charles Dickens which passes into the public domain and gets anthologized over and over as a classic horror story. Kind of a marvelous experience — great to see with Skye, who is fond of films that make strong stylistic statements and fly off the screen as visual art — but I persist in feeling as if it would alienate most of the people I know, even as I can rationally observe that, here on Letterboxd, it's the highest-rated "horror film" of the decade.
