A24 has released the first trailer for The Lighthouse, a salty psychological tale from The Witch writer/director Robert Eggers. The filmmaker co-wrote the script with Max Eggers, while Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe star as two lighthouse keepers living on a remote New England island and, it appears, going quite insane over the whole situation.

This definitely looks like the type of filmmaking that put so much buzz behind Eggers with The Witch, where he went to extreme lengths to make his Puritan tale as period-accurate as possible. The Lighthouse feels like you've been transported into an 1890s brick-and-stone seaside shack in all its leaky, grimy beauty, while Pattinson and Dafoe's performances look gnarly as hell. (As does their facial hair.) As to what's actually going on? Extremely hard to say! Like The Witch, this looks like you'll be left wondering if what you just saw is reality or nightmare—is that a giant Lovecraftian octopus behind Pattinson at one point?—but I can't say I'm not highly intrigued by everything that's going on here. Bring on this grumbly, intense fever dream by the ocean.

Check out the trailer below. The Lighthouse, which also stars Valeriia Karaman (who is credited on IMDB as "mermaid", so make of that what you will), hits select Los Angeles and New York theaters on October 18 with an expansion to follow shortly afterward.

From Robert Eggers, the visionary filmmaker behind modern horror masterpieceThe Witch, comes this hypnotic and hallucinatory tale of two lighthouse keepers on a remote and mysterious New England island in the 1890s.

For more on The Lighthouse, including our review out of the Cannes Film Festival, check out the links below:

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