The first trailer for Maine-set "The Lighthouse" was released Tuesday.
A24's black-and-white film premiered internationally in May at Cannes Film Festival in France. It now has a domestic release date of Oct. 18.
"The Lighthouse" documents a fictitious pair of 1890s Maine lighthouse keepers named Ephraim Winslow and Thomas Wake, respectively played by Robert Pattinson of "The Twilight Saga" and four-time Oscar nominee Willem Dafoe.
Winslow and Wake are trapped in isolation on a craggy Maine island, and a "cabin fever in extremis" develops from salty solitude and loneliness after the keepers are met with a storm and can't get off the remote rock.
New Hampshire native Robert Eggers, the film's director, co-wrote the script with his brother Max Eggers. Variety reports that the Eggers based the film on journals from the period, passages out of Moby-Dick author Herman Melville's work and writings from South Berwick's Sarah Orne Jewett. Jewett wrote in the late 19th century, the same time period in which "The Lighthouse" is set, and is known for her work depicting lonely, isolated Maine seaport towns in decline.
Pattinson commented on the difficulty of the downeast Maine accent during an interview with Deadline Hollywood, describing it as "quite unusual" to pull off.
"It was surprisingly difficult for me. Normally I've got quite an ear for accents but this was … [sic] … there's no real reference for it," Pattinson. "It's kind of a combination of three or four different accents, and if you just make one vowel mistake then you suddenly are doing a different accent, and you can't really control it that much."
"These old time-y, Downeast New England accents, don't have rhotic Rs, which, in that hard R, is a signpost for a Brit like [Pattinson]," Eggers told Deadline. "It's super fascinating. It's weirdly close, so that made it tricky."
A24, the domestic distributor, led a production that also included RT Features, Regency Enterprises and Parts & Labor.