An hour and three minutes into Scott Barley's audiovisual experiment, after being lulled into a sort of trance by its numerous trickles of shadowy water and majestic, fog-blanketed treescapes, the lone eye of a wandering horse suddenly entered the frame, and recontextualized the entire thing for me. Suddenly everything abstract was made real, and I remembered the film had opened in similar equine territory, with a mesmerizing shot of two horses set against darkness. It grounded me. Until that point,…

Strip away the A1 production design (you feel every spray of mist, every gust of wind), the gorgeous, claustrophobic black and white photography, the thumping, nautically-inclined score, and at its heart you’ll find a buddy comedy masquerading as a heavyweight fight between a contemporary legend and an ever-improving star. Dafoe and Pattinson chew and spit out every hardy word the Eggers brothers have laid out for them with such dialectical precision, humor, and energy it’s astonishing. Even the most savage…