Tommy is a young and attractive lad with feminine features, even Tom declared his eyes to be, “bright as a lady”. Now looking at the characters, it can be pretty heavily suggested that Tommy is gay and, given the times, closeted. Even writer and director Robert Eggers pointed out this imagery in an interview with AV Club, saying: “ nothing good happens when two men are trapped in a giant phallus”. It’s a lighthouse – the phallic imagery is OUT. It’s here that Tommy confesses to a history involving his past post as a logger where he may have murdered his platinum blonde haired colleague and taken his name for his own.īefore delving into the more nuanced interpretations, let’s get the obvious one out the way. Eventually, the two are stranded on the island longer than expected thanks to a storm, meaning they can only drink, sing shanties, wank, and spill their beans with one another, divulging in long buried secrets. If giant pleasuring tentacles aren’t enough, there’s also a siren tempting Tommy into the water, and a group of sassy, taunting seagulls which are apparently the reincarnated souls of dead sailors. Tommy believes he sees Tom naked in a suggestive manner with some giant tentacles and this image haunts him until he is obsessed with reaching this room, which creates paranoia around Tom and that elusive light. Tommy especially convinces himself that Tom won’t allow him into the light room because Tom is having an affair with the light. As expected in a horror where two characters are trapped in isolation, things start to get tense and ultimately bonkers mad. Tom is the older, experienced wicker and spends most of his time bossing Tommy (the apprentice) about, usually in-between some impressive loud farts. We see these characters try to co-inhabit while going about their daily work tasks. Our two leads are Tom (Willem Dafoe) and Ephraim (Robert Pattinson) – who we later discover is actually called Tommy, so this is the name I’ll continue to use for him throughout. The Lighthouse follows the isolated lives of two wickies sent to the furthest island in the sea to run a lighthouse. And so, let’s talk about how gay The Lighthouse really is. Plus, if it gives me the opportunity to write about one of my new favourite films, why wouldn’t I dedicate an edition of this column to this noir horror delight. Perhaps I’ve come accustomed to declaring everything gay, but this one seemed too obvious to miss. However, when scanning through tweets and reviews of this film I found very few people talking about this interpretation. To me, this film is so clearly gay that an analysis of its homoerotic subtext would be like arguing the sky is blue. Originally, when I was first researching my column, I hadn’t planned to include this film.