It was a learning curve for everyone: Robert Eggers on The Lighthouses tech experiments

Robert Eggers’ new black-and-white arthouse drama The Lighthouse is the kind of film that’s just about impossible for a studio to market. It’s nominally a horror film, set in the brutal isolation of a remote, storm-wracked coastal lighthouse in the 1890s. But it’s hard to say what kind of horror film — Eggers and his brother and co-writer Max Eggers deliberately keep the details ambiguous. It centers on an older lighthouse keeper (Willem Dafoe) who takes on a young, initially reticent apprentice (Robert Pattinson) who eventually turns belligerent. As tensions rise between them, they deal with events that might be hallucinations, or an assault by the supernatural. It’s the kind of film that deeply frustrates conventional horror fans who...

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