With The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers creates a salty sailor fever dream descent into madness that builds and builds and builds until it eventually crescendos and crashes down on its audience with the power of a stormy wave. It can easily make a viewer feel like they’ve been struck in the head and lost at sea. It’s a challenging watch, full of open-ended questions/possibilities and heavy period dialogue, but its impecable craftsmanship, faultless performances, and singular vision make it a highly rewarding treat, whether it fully lands for you or not. There’s just something magical and mesmerizing about The Lighthouse’s mystical qualities, volatile interplay between characters, and surprising humor that make it an unpredictable delight.

There are strong notes of The Shining (which are also visible to us in The VVitch) — there’s even a bit where Dafoe chases Pattinson around with an axe — but The Lighthouse feels closer to Eggers’ debut more than anything else. Both The VVitch and The Lighthouse are smaller-scale period stories about madness explored in complex ways and set in an isolated setting with very few characters. They take painstaking effort to recreate long-gone periods as close as humanly possible (in the case of The Lighthouse, Eggers and company actually built a fully functioning 70-foot lighthouse, as well as all the other building in the film), draw inspiration from history and folklore, and include animals in ominously pivotal roles. The only difference is that The Lighthouse just goes harder and sustains its fury for longer; it’s more stylized, intense, engaging, and resonate.

The solitude of its setting is made abundantly clear in its opening sequence, as lighthouse keepers (or “wickies”), Thomas and Ephraim, arrive on the barren rock to relieve the previous keepers for a four-week stay of upkeep and maintenance. Encircled by nothing by vast, aggressive ocean and littered with sharp rocks and steep cliffs, we immediately see the peril surrounding the island and understand that our characters are at the mercy of the elements. Thomas (Dafoe) is the eldest of the two, and he wastes no time flexing his tenure and letting Ephraim know he’s in charge. Instead of sharing duties, Thomas quickly claims the light for his own and leaves Ephraim (Pattinson) to the menial tedium of the grunt work, which puts an added strain between them. The two men couldn’t be more different either; Thomas is an obnoxious, blathering drunk with the sea in his blood, and Ephraim is a man of few words with a background in being a timberman. Needless to say, tensions run high, but all hell breaks loose when a viscous storm leaves the two stranded with nothing but booze and each other.