Part of Arkadin’s Cooped Up series, spotlighting films that speak to our past year of life under lockdown. 

A weirdo, black-and-white two-hander in which Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe attempt to out-crazy each other as dual “wickies” of a lighthouse located on a remote island off the coast of New England, Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse is at heart a bonkers black comedy about having a roommate that drives you insane. Steeped in bizarre sexual symbolism and baroque seafaring slang worthy of Herman Melville, the film showcases homosocial power dynamics at their rawest and most absurd. Pattinson and Dafoe trade stories, dance, sing, fight over chores and argue about mermaids as a fog of resentment and sexual tension builds in the cold North Atlantic air. Set in the late nineteenth century, the film is a return to the cinema of the distant past—its boxy aspect ratio evokes the style of early silent movies—but it is the past as seen in a nightmare. There’s a special kind of madness that emerges between two people when they find themselves completely isolated from the outside world, and no film better captures that feeling of mutually-reinforcing insanity better than this one. —Keith Watson