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Robert Pattinson and Willem Defoe play antagonistic lighthouse keepers in a twisted tale of men and loneliness.

Manohla Dargis

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Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson are two of the most fascinating – and pleasantly unnerving – face in the movie. In “the lighthouse,” a sly American Gothic set in the late 19th century, directed by Robert Eggers, the lights and shots of the cast highlight every bony plane, every facial crease, hollow and pinprick stubble. The sharp black-and-white cinematography deepens the shadows and anxieties of the film, but it also casts those grizzled faces in relief, sharpening cheekbones and revealing the head of death beneath 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.

An old salt with troubled hair and a wedge-shaped beard worthy of Melville, Wake is the veteran Keeper of the flame lighthouse, the Keeper of its traditions, language and superstitions. (Never kill a Seagull, he warns.) Defoe’s mercurial movements, his ripples and eerie smiles, combine perfectly, articulating Wake’s mood and adding to the destabilisation. He barks orders, sings shack, indulges in sentimentality and turns his yowling mouth into an abyss. To Winslow’s growing annoyance, Wake also guards the key to the lantern room, a glowing, almost mystical chamber with a magnificent prism that provides the film with bursts of bright light.

With control and precision, expressionist lighting and an old-fashioned square film frame that adds to the claustrophobia, Eggers seamlessly blurs the lines between physical space and head space. The men in “The Lighthouse” don’t use the therapy-speak of contemporary American cinema (or life) with its endless overexplaining. Instead, Wake and Winslow come into focus through guttural exchanges, their physicality (farting, sweating, straining) and their built and natural environments. The sparse grass and rocky outcrops, the cramped rooms and vertiginous stairs speak to the men’s existential condition — the hardness, confinement and downward spiraling — while (as in “The Witch”) a menacing animal suggests a supernatural threat.

Early on, Wake strips — as if to bathe in the lighthouse’s radiance — and the story takes a turn for the amusingly perverse as trouble starts creeping around the edges. The men’s antagonism deepens as Wake jabbers and Winslow rages, a fury that Pattinson makes visible with eyes that widen into bulges and tremors of emotion that ping under a masklike vacancy. One man masturbates in a frenzy; at another point, he spies on the other grinding alone. The men’s sloppy, alcohol-saturated time together produces intimacy but also menace. They laugh, descending into riotous drunkenness and finding connection that both they and Eggers skitter around. The film itself doesn’t so much deepen as continue to glide on its seductive surfaces and teasing promise.

“Beacon” mostly without women. But their footprints are scattered throughout, popping up in the men’s anecdotes (their stories hide as much as they reveal) and in the mermaid figurine that Winslow finds. He gets the raw statuette through a tear in the mattress, digging it out of the hairy stuffing with probing fingers that Eggers – who has the eye of a miniaturist – shows close-up. (The scene evokes Harvey Keitel stroking a hole in Holly hunter’s stocking in “piano,” another 19th-century Gothic story.) For Winslow, the mermaid fetish, the replacement is something that remains elusive, and that-as memories suggest-he can’t quite voice.

The story in “The Lighthouse” is thin enough to invite plentiful interpretations about masculinity, homosocial relations and desire, even if its more suggestive theme is Wake’s punishing exploitation of Winslow. (It recalls Leslie Fiedler’s observation that “the proper subject” of the American Gothic is slavery.) The film’s more sustained pleasures, though, are its form and style, its presumptive influences (von Stroheim’s “Greed,” German Expressionism), the frowning curve of Winslow’s mustache, the whites of eyes rolled back in terror. Eggers meticulously sets the scene, adds texture and builds tension and mystery from men locked in battle and sometimes in embrace.

He created a story about an age-old struggle that is most satisfactorily expressed in this film’s own tussle between the genre and its deviations.

Lighthouse

Rated R for nudity, salty language, and animal violence. Duration: 1 hour 49 minutes.

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The data about movies are obtained from IMDb.com

Manohla Dargis has been one of the main film critics since 2004. She began writing about films professionally in 1987, earning a bachelor’s degree in film from new York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. @ManohlaDargis and Facebook

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