Critic Reviews

In the push-pull between Secareanu’s resonant stillness and O’Connor’s barely sublimated intensity, you feel the struggle of two souls forging a path toward each other, gradually realizing that while life may be harsh and unforgiving, love doesn’t have to be.

In his debut feature, Lee has crafted a mature love story centered on an immature man facing the fear of even admitting that he needs love at all. It’s a film to prize.

A stirring romance between an emotionally stifled sheep farmer and an irrepressible Romanian migrant worker, isn’t shy about paying homage to the classic “Brokeback Mountain,” but in many ways, this British film turns out better.

There will be many people who see themselves in the furtive glances and mud-covered kisses from which God’s Own Country weaves its harsh but hopeful narrative, and they will do so while witnessing a finely crafted piece of cinema.

The chemistry between these two men is inescapable, their relationship growing almost imperceptibly, composed expertly in a nuanced script by Lee and unfussily filmed by director of photography Joshua James Richards (Songs My Brothers Taught Me).

Graced by its refreshingly frank treatment of gay sexuality, its casually expressive use of nudity, and its eloquent depiction of animal husbandry as a contrasting metaphor for the absence of human tenderness, this is a rigorously naturalistic drama that yields stirring performances from the collision between taciturn demeanors and roiling emotional undercurrents.

Lee’s love for this hard land and the boy trapped in it – so fully embodied by young British actor Josh O’Connor – is unexpectedly moving and rich.

God’s Own Country weaves a rough magic from Joshua James Richards’s biting cinematography and the story’s slow, unsteady arc from bitter to hopeful.

Writer-director Francis Lee captures not only what masculinity does and how it comes undone, but the complex apparatus that keeps it into place: the family’s surveillance, the silence, the shame.

As the story arcs toward its touching denouement, it’s those quiet moments — imbued with the windswept soul of the landscape — that harbor the most lyrical beauty.