You think you’ve got it bad, sitting at home with no one but your dog, roommate, spouse or kids for company?

It could be worse.

You could be Robert Pattinson’s character in The Lighthouse, the 2019 indie thriller from The Witch writer-director Robert Eggers.

The Lighthouse is about two lighthouse keepers in 19th-century New England. It’s their job to maintain a ship-saving lamp on a wave-swept island, all alone for months.

But life is hard on the island. And one of these men harbors a terrible secret. One that’s bound to slip free as the wind howls, the waves swell, the liquor flows and the two keepers steadily drive each other howling mad.

That’s right. The Lighthouse is sort of like what many of are experiencing as we self-quarantine amid the coronavirus pandemic. Only a bit worse for the two poor souls who have no one but each other for company.

Pattinson plays Thomas Howard, the young and, uh, more normal of the two keepers. His partner and boss on the island is Thomas Wake, played by Willem Dafoe.

Now, Dafoe with his craggy features, minor-key voice and beady dark eyes often plays strange, even grotesque, characters. Rarely however has he played one as strange and grotesque as Wake.

The senior lighthouse-keeper is gassy, loud, demanding and needy. And he drinks. A lot. The drunker he gets, the more he needs Pattinson’s Howard to compliment his cooking.

When the put-upon Howard declines at one particularly gin-soaked meal to celebrate Wake’s lobster dish, Wake launches into a Shakespearean curse that is both a masterpiece of writing and performance and the most grandiose moment in the movie.

And that’s saying a lot, because later in the film, both Howard and Wake go mad. The moment they break involves confessions, kissing, a fistfight, attempted murder, a mermaid and some really nasty seagulls.

There’s an intensely sexual quality to the conflict. “The two men actually talk about the light in the lighthouse as if it’s a female character,” Eggers told Vox. “They fight over her. Willem Dafoe’s character says something like, ‘No man will touch her but me.’”

It should go without saying that the feelings the keepers develop for the lighthouse spill out into their own fraught relationship as the storm rages and the gin flows. It also should go without saying that neither character is entirely comfortable with the things they say and do while drunk, jealous, afraid and horny.

The Lighthouse is a lifeboat movie, so-named for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 adaptation of a John Steinbeck novella, in which American and British survivors of a U-boat attack must survive the elements and each other while crowded into a lifeboat. There’s nowhere for the characters, and the camera, to escape to.

The setup produces instant tension. In The Lighthouse, Eggers amplifies that tension by shooting the movie in black and white in a 1.19-to-one aspect ratio, meaning the picture is practically square. Just the right proportions for a human face to fill it in close-up.

There’s no color and nothing on either side of the image to distract from Pattinson’s resentful eyes. Dafoe’s snarl. The two keepers have only each other as the world howls around them. Right now it’s a problem roughly two-thirds of Americans share.

The Lighthouse is streaming on several major platforms.

David Axe serves as Defense Editor of the National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels  War Fix, War Is Boring and Machete Squad.