In the rundown of worst roommate habits, persistent flatulence has to rank pretty highly. But I can’t imagine even the gnarliest gas could possibly compete with the sour stench of stale pee stewing in a bedpan in a tight communal space. Which brings us to The Lighthouse, a film wherein, from the first moments, odors assert themselves. The celluloid reeks of old piss, beefy farts, caked-up spunk, “rotten foreskin”, man musk, and drinkable kerosene. This is a movie that would tear down the house in Smell-O-Vision. Fortunately, we do not have to endure its reek.

As soon as The Lighthouse hummed to life, I could tell that this movie was going to be extremely my shit. Visionary writer-director Robert Eggers’ follow-up to his horror masterpiece The Witch (still the best film of the decade, in this critic’s opinion) is filmmaking as time travel. Taking us all the way back to the very birthplace of film itself, Eggers opts for the 1.19:1 aspect ratio used by pioneering filmmakers like Fritz Lang to set an early claustrophobic tone, boxing the audience into its square frame and transporting them back to the Golden Era of late 19th century orthochromatic film, precisely when the film is to take place.

Shot gorgeously on grainy 35mm black-and-white film, The Lighthouse takes us back to a time before widescreen, relaying a story that feels like a long-lost time capsule washed ashore. Eggers’ attention to detail is outrageous and you can see it expressed in every aspect of the film, from Craig Lathrop’s anachronism production design to Eggers nautically-accurate dialogue. Even the titular 70-foot lighthouse was built from scratch to satisfy the extremely specific criteria of the filmmaker, down to its fully functioning beacon, which could be seen 16 miles out to sea.

Like The Witch before it, The Lighthouse deals in isolation and elements. Set on a far-flung rock off the coast of Maine sometime before the turn of the 20th century, two lighthouse keepers see their four-week tenure indefinitely extended after a vicious storm keeps relief at bay. Eggers again proves masterful at bringing the impossibilities of antiquity to life. Like the infertile New England woods before it, the ocean is this film’s untamable frontier, where men stand at the mercy of nature and dream of salvation.

Modern conveniences like e-readers, smart phones, and weather channels can’t ease the deteriorating minds of Thomas and Winslow, Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson respectively. What to do when you’re stranded on a remote island with nothing but a laundry list of chores and diminishing rations? Tell tale tales. Sing sailing songs. Masturbate to wooden mermaid figurines. Boil lobsters. And drink. Lots and lots of drink.

As their watch spins on to indeterminable length, the movie becomes about two men staring into the void, pissing into the wind, confronting their own emptiness. Stuck with their waterlogged souls, unable to wash clean the sins of their past. Effectively shipwrecked on their far-flung rock, kept company (or harassed) by sea-birds and ocean spray. Marooned in each another’s company. Pattinson’s tight-lipped Winslow takes his role seriously and avoids the drink that gives Dafoe’s Thomas solace. But all good habits die hard, particularly went confronted with hardship. As Winslow takes to libation and the storm signals no end in sight, despair and rage take root.

The veteran Thomas isn’t so easily shaken. A grumbling wickie, he proves both a capable and committed tender but one scrambled in his own history and possibly incapable of truth. Thomas alleges to be a former sea captain but his stories don’t always add up and the fact that his last second-mate died in mysterious circumstances only makes him more suspect. He is a faucet of truth, lies, and sea tales of ragged origin. As the pair unravel, their cold-blooded working relationship buckles and blooms into friendship, rivalry, love, hurt, and hatred. There’s no question that both make it out the other side intact.

Pattinson and Dafoe offer battering ram performances, the later’s turn particularly steeped in greatness. This was a role Dafoe was seemingly born to play: a seafaring King Lear type with broiling dagger eyes and a hard tongue. Espousing dialogue that would make a lesser actor blush, Dafoe rages, a brightly-burning tempest snacking on Eggers’ scrumptious dialogue. Pattinson too mostly manages his vaguely 18th century Irish New Yorker accent but it’s when he asserts himself through his eyes, or exerts character through his lumbering, shrunken physicality, that his indeterminable volume as a performer comes to bear. Purely as a thespian two-hander, The Lighthouse is a heavy-hitter, especially as sanity loses its grasp.

Eggers inflicts the madness of his character upon his audience too. Time will pass and we cannot be certain if it has been a day or weeks. We see one thing and are told another. One character swings an axe, the other takes credit for the swinging. This inherent untruth is exacerbated by the fact that Thomas is an unreliable narrator. Or maybe he is not. And perhaps that’s the point. In the madhouse, objectivity rots like the peacock-colored flesh of the scurvy patient.

A singular and brilliant creation, The Lighthouse warbles a demented ballad of madness and companionship, using horror movie tropes without ever really committing to being a full-fledged horror movie. Rather, this is a tale of fleeting sanity, one where we watch the tendrils that hold men to civility dissolve. Defying simple classification, Eggers’ tale is sailor folklore made cinema, a jumble of human drama, nautical legend, and high fantasy; the realities of hard men and the illusions brought on by cabin fever. There’s tentacle porn, mermaids, mocking seagulls, and a deadly hungover Robert Pattinson emptying two heaping bedpans into the wind only to be blown back in his face, and seeing Eggers tie it all together into a nifty bow is a glorious affair not to be missed.

The Lighthouse smacks of atmospheric originality; ’tis a thing to behold and cherish. Eggers’ dialogue is a marvel. And though I’m not going to pretend I understood it all (but that only makes it all the more ripe for an immediate rewatch), I found myself constantly under its spell. The hypnotic sound design, led by the lighthouse’s signal braying and bellowing like a sick cow, will tempt one to their own madness. And both Dafoe and Pattinson are operating at the top of their game and should both be in serious consideration come award’s season, despite the film’s untraditional makings. As one might expect from the guy who brought us The Witch, Eggers’ tightly-wound story is suggestive, eerie, original, and smart as a whip; deeply playful, darkly funny and deadly solemn. Fall under its siren spell but bring your own wood-block lifejacket. You’ll want to float too.

CONCLUSION: A24’s unsettling ‘The Lighthouse’ is like a message in a bottle from a far off time, one that signals writer-director Robert Eggers established brilliance. Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson are electric as stranded men with unfurling sanity and unmoored moral compasses in this wholly original nautical folk tale about paranoia, desolation, mermaids, murder, moral decay, and self-destruction.