The Witch concerns an English family, including four children, banished from a seventeenth-century puritan township over a religious dispute. They establish a farm at the edge of a secluded forest. In the first of a series of horrific events, their newborn child disappears while in the care of their teenage daughter, Thomasin. Unbeknown to them, it is the work of a witch; in lieu of any plausible explanation, the deeply superstitious parents blame the disappearance on Thomasin. The film links witches with female sexuality. Indeed, it posits witchcraft as a liberating option for an uneducated young woman in a hardscrabble, patriarchal settler society, a facet of the story that was doubtless a factor in the film’s success.

Willem Defoe as Wake and Robert Pattinson as Howard in The Lighthouse (photographs via A24)

Set in the late nineteenth century, The Lighthouse covers some similar territory but focuses on the energies conjured by a different malevolent force: the potentially dark side of masculinity. Howard (Pattinson) and Wake (Defoe) are two ‘wickies’, so called because it was their job to trim the wicks on the oil lanterns used in early lighthouses. The film starts with the men being unceremoniously deposited on a remote New England island for a four-week stint. Howard is young, inexperienced, secretive, a drifter who is hiding from things in his past. Wake, the one in charge, is an older, grizzled lighthouse expert with a serious drinking problem, who alternates between fatherly tenderness and irascibility. Howard is assigned a series of increasingly difficult, dirty, menial jobs, while Wake tends the lighthouse lamp, before which he appears to bathe naked and refuses to let the younger man near.

Eggers throws a number of supernatural elements into this mix. On his first day on the island, Howard discovers a small figurine of a mermaid in a hole in his mattress. He subsequently finds a mermaid washed up on the island. But is the creature real or in his imagination? There is also the presence of an aggressive one-eyed seagull, which Wake warns him not to harm because he believes the birds are reincarnated sailors. And what is the old man so possessively guarding in the lantern room? The tensions between the two eventually boil over when a massive storm prevents their relief from arriving, threatening to strand them on their desolate station indefinitely.

Eggers is able to make so much out of such a slim premise and small cast, essentially Pattinson and Defoe, who fully inhabit their characters and bounce off each other expertly. The only other significant role is that of the mermaid, played by Valeriia Karaman. The Witch draws much of its narrative power from Eggers’s close study of historical accounts of witchcraft in early-settler America. The Lighthouse, which Eggers scripted with his brother, Max, is based on accounts by lighthouse keepers, including a real-life mystery involving a story of two wickies stationed at a small lighthouse in Wales in the early nineteenth century. The brothers supplement this with material from Herman Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson, as well as ‘weird fiction’ author H.P. Lovecraft. One can also detect more recent influences, such as Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), in the depiction of the mental impact of isolation.

Robert Pattinson as Howard in The Lighthouse (photograph via A24)

Much like the forests in The Witch, the island and its fauna are rendered starkly beautiful but also alien and threatening. This atmosphere is reinforced by the scrupulously detailed depiction of nineteenth-century seafaring culture, including a specially constructed tower on the Nova Scotian coast, where the film was set, and the colourful period language. The film is shot in black and white by cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, who also filmed The Witch, with a narrow aspect ratio that makes the interiors feel cramped and boxy, much like a framed photograph from the period.

While The Lighthouse is an immersive experience for most of its nearly two-hour duration, the last quarter feels somewhat predictable in a way that the plot of The Witch does not. Perhaps the possibilities inherent in a story of women and witchcraft are richer than two damaged men left to their regret, fear, anger, and each other, a reality that all the psychological horror, historical detail, and salty period language can’t head off. It is the one weakness in an otherwise solid effort.

The Lighthouse (A24), directed by Robert Eggers, opens in selected cinemas on February 6.