The easiest way to describe God’s Own Country is to label it Brokeback Yorkshire Moors. It is a tale of repression and frustration in a lonely and uncomfortable natural environment, but it’s also something that explores a very British resignation to accepting the status quo, the notion of family ties that keep you firmly rooted in one place, and a small serving of xenophobia.
Josh O’Connor plays Johnny Saxby, a young man who spends his days doing a lot of work on the family farm, where he lives with his stern father (Ian Hart) and his grandmother (Gemma Jones). With very little else to occupy his time, Johnny spends most evenings getting blind drunk at the nearest pub. He sometimes manages to make time for a quick sexual encounter with another man, but the focus is on getting it done quickly before anyone notices. When the farm takes on hired help for a week or so (a Romanian migrant worker named Gheorghe, played by Alec Secareanu), Johnny has someone to take his resentment out on, but also someone who can keep him company as they share time together with nobody else nearby.
Written and directed by Francis Lee, making his feature debut after serving up a few shorts (and having worked as a jobbing actor for a couple of decades before those), God’s Own Country is a slow and deliberate study of someone trying to spend time ignoring their own feelings, despite being on their own most of the time. Soundtracked by animal noises and the near-constant wind blowing over the fields, it is a film highlighting how people can acclimatize to their situation so well that they then struggle to deal with parts of themselves that seem incompatible.
While the cast all do good work (Jones and Hart both doing their usual excellent work, Secareanu holds his own impressively as a relative newcomer on the scene), the star of the show is O’Connor, working hard to show the vulnerability and pain in a character who spends some time being as unpleasant as possible to those around him: lashing out because they’re there, and he feels trapped.
Although it isn’t unrelentingly gloomy, this is a bleak tale that only gives viewers a very occasional sense of hope. That is in line with how the main characters may see their lives, all clouds and fleeting moments of sunshine, but Lee tries hard to reward viewers who sit through so much misery. Whether it’s the saving of a weak newborn animal or the potential repairing of a sorely-damaged family unit, there are scenes here that do just enough to remind us that small acts can be hugely rewarding, and that one small change can make a massive difference to someone who has only ever known a constant timetable they thought they would be enslaved to forever.
Sometimes painful to watch, sometimes frustrating, God’s Own Country is also sometimes (just sometimes) uplifting. And it is always moving and engrossing. Highly recommended.
8/10
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