It’s hard to think straight when you can barely see your hand in front of your face. Dense fog that lasts for days can give you an unmistakably creepy feeling; in the back of your mind, there’s a sense of being shut in, even when you’re outside. It’s an experience that’s usually only had when living on the coast; combining it with rocky terrain, punishing winds, and foul companions gives you a surefire recipe for madness.

I can’t say I’ve ever felt the sort of isolation that grips the two characters in The Lighthouse, but I do have a feel for their environment. Growing up in the same part of the world where the movie was shot, there was something instantly recognizable about the location, even if the story takes place in the 1890s. If you don’t have that familiarity, Robert Eggers’ latest release still has a way of picking you up by the scruff of your neck, and tossing you bodily into the shared fever dream of Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) and Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson).

Shot on black and white celluloid in a super-square 1.19:1 aspect ratio, from its first frames The Lighthouse feels like a long-lost print found in a buried sea chest. We begin with Wake and Winslow arriving on a desolate island off the coast of New England, to begin a four-week stint manning the lighthouse there. Wake is a seasoned lighthouse keeper, but Winslow is new to the profession, having signed up after a series of false starts in other parts of the world, most recently cutting timber in Canada. Wake immediately assigns Winslow to all the grueling manual labour around the station, while he locks himself in the lantern room at night.

Winslow suspects that Wake might be obsessed with the lantern somehow, but his own mind is just as fragile. He has troubling dreams about mermaids and tentacled sea monsters, and an incident in his past clearly haunts him. Winslow and Wake are soon squabbling over just about everything, and as their quarrel builds to a climax, a storm is approaching that might kill them before they can kill each other.

Along with his previous film, The Witch, Eggers has shot to the forefront of most film buffs’ minds as an up-and-coming horror master. He throws out many of the cliché techniques from the slasher subgenre, in favour of building a sense of dread purely with locations and performances. Even if you’re not the superstitious type, Eggers is able to make you believe that a violent encounter between Winslow and a one-eyed seagull is like Winslow signing his death warrant. There’s no big set pieces to distract you; the storytelling is so sparse that I instinctively clung to every detail in the dialogue, like a traveler searching for a beam of light in a mire.

Even though I feel like I’ll need to continue my one-man Robert Pattinson PR campaign for a while (there’s still people who only know him from Twilight), the actor’s work in The Lighthouse is a helpful waypoint. Press junket interviews with Dafoe and Pattinson suggest that their differing styles of preparation helped inform the fractious relationship between their characters, and it’s fascinating to see how fluidly Winslow and Wake go from being on stable terms to wanting to end each other with an axe. Both performances are studies in how anger manifests itself: with Wake, it’s simmering constantly and kept hidden, but with Winslow, his anger is a hurricane that burns itself out, only to gather steam again.

Eggers’ two films to date and his planned follow up feel like they’re bound to classical elements. If The Witch is connected to the earth – the colonist family trying to scratch out a living near a massive forest – then The Lighthouse is connected to the wind that blasts the island and the sound of the foghorn that Winslow feeds with coal. Reports indicate his next film will have an association with water, or at least the Viking raiders who sailed upon it. Complementing this are the raw, primeval performances that Eggers gets out of his casts. I can’t wait to see what sort of new terrors he summons from the mist.

The Lighthouse gets four stars out of four.

Stray thoughts

• The song used during the credits (and very effectively in one of the trailers) is “Doodle Let Me Go (Yaller Girls) by A.L. Lloyd. Such a great fit for the movie, and I almost wish we got to hear another one during the film itself.

• Can I get the costume designer to make me an outfit to survive some of Canada’s inclement weather?

• Is it just me, or was Pattinson’s accent slipping a bit here and there?