Robert Eggers has only directed three feature films in his short career as a filmmaker, but he has already developed the kind of instantly-recognizable point-of-view that many artists spend a lifetime cultivating.

Eggers burst onto the scene with 2015’s “The Witch”: a film so awesome that we’re willing to forgive it for inadvertently launching the asinine “elevated horror” discourse. The folk horror film took a scalpel to the Puritanical societies of 17th century New England, allowing Eggers to demonstrate his disturbingly thorough understanding of the darkness in the human mind when he exposed what was beneath the surface.

He continued to explore themes of isolation and sexual repression with his sophomore feature “The Lighthouse,” which ensured that nobody who sees it will ever view mermaids the same way again. He followed that with “The Northman,” his historically accurate (and endlessly metal) Viking epic based on the myth that inspired “Hamlet.