Film

The Lighthouse

Name: The Lighthouse
Genre: Drama, Fantasy, Thriller
Released: 2019
Cast: Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe, Valeriia Karaman, Logan Hawkes, Kyla Nicolle

Robert Eggers traps two lighthouse keepers on a rock in the 1890s and lets the fog, the foghorn, and each other slowly unmake them. Shot in near-square black and white with a wheezing analogue soundtrack, it's less a story than an atmosphere you're sealed inside — Melvillian dialogue, mermaid hallucinations, and a rivalry that curdles into something feral. Punishing, gorgeous, and very funny in a way you don't expect until it happens.

TMDb rating

7.5

If you liked this

The Witch2016

Eggers' first feature, and the template: another isolated family, another creeping conviction that the wilderness itself is malevolent, built from the same period-accurate dread and folkloric dread.

But Slower and quieter than The Lighthouse — the horror here is domestic paranoia, not full-throttle madness.

Nosferatu1922

Eggers again, this time full gothic horror — same appetite for candlelit dread, period texture, and a heroine unraveling under something ancient and hungry.

But Bigger and more traditionally plotted; less of the claustrophobic two-hander intensity that makes The Lighthouse so strange.

Midsommar2019

Another slow, sun-drenched (rather than fog-drenched) descent where isolation and ritual dismantle a person's grip on reality, shot with the same painterly patience.

But Daylight horror rather than nocturnal — some find it too clean and composed to feel truly unhinged.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Touching the Void2003

Same descent into hallucination and unreliable perception under extreme isolation, but delivered as documentary fact instead of folklore, which makes it hit differently — and just as hard.

A docudrama reconstruction of a real mountaineering disaster, where a stranded, injured climber starts hallucinating from isolation and pain exactly like Eggers' wickies — except this actually happened.

But No mermaids, no myth — this is true survival horror, grounded and matter-of-fact rather than gothic or ambiguous.

Hereditary2018

Grief, guilt, and inherited madness curdle into something operatic — if you want the dial turned up on domestic horror's slow burn into full derangement.

But Family trauma horror rather than maritime myth; a very different emotional register underneath the dread.

The Shining1980

The granddaddy of two-people-and-isolation-equals-madness stories, with the same interest in how a place itself seems to be doing the haunting.

But Wider, colder, and more overtly supernatural — Kubrick's control is chillier than Eggers' feral, sweaty intensity.

Apocalypse Now1979

A journey into a remote, half-mythic outpost where civilization peels off a man layer by layer — the jungle standing in for Eggers' rock and fog.

But War epic scale and Vietnam politics are a long way from a two-hander on a lighthouse; different machinery entirely.

Cast Away2000

Total isolation, survival instinct, and a man talking to something that isn't quite company — the loneliness Eggers weaponizes here played straight and sincere.

But Warmer and more redemptive; there's no ambient dread, just endurance and eventual hope.

The Revenant2015

Brutal, elemental, and gorgeously shot survival cinema where nature and vengeance strip a man down to something primal — similar physical punishment, similar visual grandeur.

But Straightforward revenge narrative rather than psychological unraveling; less ambiguous, more linear.

Under the Skin2014

Cold, alien, hypnotic, and soaked in dread — if what you loved was the mood rather than the plot, this delivers pure atmosphere with almost no plot at all.

But Glacially slow and largely wordless; frustrating if you wanted The Lighthouse's verbal sparring and black comedy.

The Wages of Fear1953

The same structural engine — two men, one confined dangerous task, mounting psychological strain — built by a director working forty years before Eggers with the same patience for slow-burn tension.

Two men forced into close, punishing proximity by an impossible job, their nerve and sanity eroding mile by mile — a black-and-white forebear of Eggers' pressure-cooker two-hander, decades before he made it.

But It's a slow-building thriller about nitroglycerin trucks, not horror — the dread is entirely earthbound, no supernatural undertow at all.

Splash1984

Both films are obsessed with the mermaid as an object of longing that pulls a man away from the ordinary world — one plays it as horror, the other as a Reagan-era rom-com, same myth, opposite mood entirely.

A studio-era romantic comedy about a man falling for a literal mermaid — sweet, silly, and completely sincere about the same sea-myth The Lighthouse turns feverish and menacing.

But Broad, sunny, mainstream Tom Hanks comedy — if you want dread or ambiguity, this offers precisely none.