The actors in question, almost the only people in the whole film, are Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, who seem to be competing to see who can have the most gaunt and hollow face. Both of them could use their cheekbones as deadly weapons. Dafoe plays Thomas Wake, a veteran ‘wickie’ (lighthouse keeper) with a bushy beard, a clay pipe, a wooden leg and a plentiful supply of rum. Pattinson is Ephraim Winslow, a taciturn drifter who comes to Thomas’s wave-bashed little island to help him tend to its squat lighthouse.