The Lighthouse

The Lighthouse is a 2019 film directed and produced by Robert Eggers, from a screenplay cowritten with his brother Max Eggers. It stars Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson as turmoiled nineteenth-century lighthouse keepers stranded at a remote New England outpost by a violent storm. The film has defied genre categorization in media, leading to multiple interpretations from critics.

The idea of The Lighthouse first emerged from Max Eggers's re-envisioning of Edgar Allan Poe's unfinished short story of the same name. Robert Eggers assisted the development when Max was unable to complete his adaptation, sourcing the plot from a nineteenth-century legend of an accident at a Welsh lighthouse. The Lighthouse draws visually from photography of 1890s New England, maritime-themed French cinema from the 1930s, and symbolist art. Principal photography took place in Nova Scotia, Canada, beginning in April 2018 and lasting slightly over a month. It was shot in black-and-white, with a nearly-square 1.19:1 aspect ratio. Mark Korven developed the film's score, evoking the sounds and mythologies of the sea.