Pleasure and pain of a tormented soul

in their chamber pot, giving new meaning to the term captain’s log.

Tom’s a nightmare. Almost immediately, though, we’re given a sense of his vulnerability (a deliberately over-exposed sequence all but invites us to climb inside his frazzled skull). And he’s a fountain of potent phrases. Tom demands that the lighthouse be made to “sparkle like a sperm whale’s pecker!” Thanks both to Eggers and Dafoe’s terrifically nuanced performance, Tom is, in every sense, a keeper.

Pattinson is just as good, if not as well served by the script. In a diatribe, towards the end, his character makes reference to Moby Dick and uses the word “parody”. That monologue (which went down a storm at Cannes) struck me as too knowing, introducing ideas that the film can’t find an original way to explore.

Meanwhile, the mermaid that inspires so much lust in Ephraim is all wrong. As played by Valeriia Karaman, this object of desire has the full lips of a