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The Lighthouse | Official Trailer HD | A24

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A24 drops the first look at Robert Eggers’ descent into madness on a rock in the middle of nowhere.

A24 released the debut teaser for The Lighthouse on July 30, 2019, and it wastes no time establishing dread. The film reunites Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson as two keepers trapped together on an isolated New England lighthouse in the 1890s, and the trailer alone is enough to signal that this is not a haunted-house movie — it’s a slow, salt-soaked unraveling of two men who cannot stand each other and cannot leave.

• Willem Dafoe plays veteran “wickie” Thomas Wake and Robert Pattinson plays his new assistant Ephraim Winslow, stationed together on a remote 1890s New England island.
• Director Robert Eggers, who broke through with The Witch, co-wrote the script with his brother Max Eggers and shot the film in stark black-and-white on 35mm in a narrow vintage aspect ratio.
• The Lighthouse already won the FIPRESCI Critics’ Prize at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight in May 2019, ahead of its scheduled October 18, 2019 theatrical release via A24.

Two Keepers, One Rock

Eggers frames the story as a two-hander built entirely on distrust. The trailer opens with Wake grilling Winslow about why a timberman would take a job as a lighthouse keeper: “Tell me, what’s a timberman want with being a wickie?… Keeping secrets, are you?” It’s a small exchange, but it sets the entire premise — two strangers isolated on a storm-battered island, each convinced the other is hiding something.

The film was shot on Nova Scotia’s western shore at Cape Forchu, a real, working lighthouse location that gives the black-and-white photography its authentic bleakness. There’s no green-screen fog here — just rock, surf, and two men slowly losing their grip.

The Descent Captured in 35mm

After the opening dialogue, the trailer accelerates into a frantic, almost hypnotic montage: foghorns blaring, the score screeching, and flashes of heavy drinking, sea shanties, violence, tentacles, and what appears to be a submerged body. It’s less a traditional “plot preview” and more a sensory approximation of what it feels like to go mad in isolation.

That disorientation crystallizes in the trailer’s closing line, delivered by Dafoe’s Wake as he seems to lose track of time itself:

How long have we been on this rock? Five weeks? Two days? Help me to recollect.

It’s the kind of line that tells you everything about the film’s structure without giving away a single plot beat — time, sanity, and reality all start to blur the longer these two stay stranded together.

From Cannes to a October Release

This isn’t a cold pitch to audiences. The Lighthouse already had its premiere back in May 2019 at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight sidebar, where it picked up the FIPRESCI Critics’ Prize — a strong early signal from critics before A24 ever cut a trailer. With the teaser now out, the studio confirmed the film would also screen at the Toronto International Film Festival ahead of a wide theatrical release set for October 18, 2019.

That timeline puts The Lighthouse in the same lane A24 has carved out with prior festival-to-theater plays — build critical buzz overseas, let the trailer do the rest. Given Eggers’ pedigree from The Witch and the FIPRESCI win already banked, expectations are already high heading into the fall specialty box office.

A24 hasn’t said much beyond the runtime and release date, but the studio’s marketing has leaned entirely on mood over plot — no synopsis crawl, no talking-head hype, just Dafoe growling about secrets and Pattinson looking increasingly unwell. If the finished cut delivers on what’s in this ninety seconds, October 18 becomes one of the more talked-about arthouse openings of the fall.