The Lighthouse

Dir. Robert Eggers 2019, USA, Canada 110 min Parental Guidance Advised

One Night Only! This gleefully gothic fantasy filmed on the Nova Scotia coast features exceptional performances by Robert Pattison and Wilem Dafoe.

Robert Eggers caused a stir with his beautifully controlled horror film The Witch, but no one expected him to attain the level of modern master with this, his hallucinatory follow-up.

As two lighthouse keepers trying to maintain their sanity while confined to a desolate, windswept rock off the coast of 19th-century Maine, Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson are both mesmerizing, the former a peg-legged and petulant veteran named Tom Wake and the latter a close-mouthed Canadian named Ephraim Winslow, whose haunted look suggests some skulduggery in his past. Eggers plays the two men off of each other - they both slowly come apart at the seams - and conflates the tropes of the gothic horror and supernatural genres in an unclassifiable wonder that both shocks and surprises.

Cannes Film Festival 2019: Winner of FIPRESCI Prize