The marketing geniuses behind auteur film distribution company A24 have done it again: created boundless hype around an upcoming indie movie. Director Robert Eggers was previously responsible for A24’s The Witch (2015), a folktale set in the spooky, autumnal, witch-fearing days of 1600’s Puritan New England, and featuring the most seductive demon imaginable (Black Phillip, a goat with an exceedingly sensuous voice).
The Lighthouse fast-forwards a few centuries to the 1890s, promising a “nautical psychodrama” in which two lighthouse keepers—Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, of course—live together on a remote New England island. The trailer for the black-and-white film has Dafoe and Pattinson cloaked in shadows and raincoats, singing sea shantys and getting hammered while storms batter their coasts. Briefly, we glimpse a mermaid and a squid whose tentacles are wrapped around RPattz’s neck.
This might be a buddy movie: two pals against the elements, tryna make a living. Or it could be a Brokeback Mountain Part II: sailors exiled to an island because their illicit love has doomed them. Or perhaps these two are not actually lighthouse keepers at all, but rather patients in a psych ward. Maybe they’ve gone mad, and the ocean is merely a fierce hallucination. Guess we’ll find out.
The Lighthouse hits theaters October 8. And check out this gorgeous poster—did I say A24 knows how to market?
