Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson have two of the most mesmerizing — and pleasurably unnerving — physiognomies in movies. In “The Lighthouse,” a sly American Gothic set in the late 19th century, the director Robert Eggers lights and frames the actors to emphasize every bony plane, every facial crease, hollow and pinprick of stubble. The stark black-and-white cinematography deepens the film's shadows and unease, but it also throws these grizzled faces into relief, sharpening their cheekbones and revealing the death’s head under each man’s grimace .

A horror movie about inner and outer darkness, the film begins with two lighthouse workers, Wake (Dafoe) and Winslow (Pattinson), arriving on a small, desolate island. Over many solitary days and nights, they work, eat, drink and dig at each other, establishing a bristling antagonism born of temperament and boredom or maybe just narrative convenience. Wake likes to yammer, but the men aren’t ready conversationalists. In time, their minds and tongues are loosened by alcohol and perhaps a simple human need for companionship. The wind howls, the camera prowls, the sea roars and Eggers flexes his estimable filmmaking technique as an air of mystery rapidly thickens.

Much as he did in his shivery feature debut, “The Witch,” about an isolated family of fundamentalists coming unglued in early 17th-century America, Eggers makes the secluded world in “The Lighthouse” at once recognizable and eerily unfamiliar, a combination that draws you in but makes you feel unsettled. (He shares script credit with Max Eggers, his brother.) The image of the lighthouse evokes visions of high seas and storms as well as the promise of safe passage and harbor. But here, that romantic idea soon sours. Looming against the perennially gray sky this brick tower looks utilitarian and ominous, a twin to the 19th century’s industrial smokestacks.