It’s tempting to describe English novelist-turned-filmmaker Helen Walsh’s fine-grained gay love story On the Sea as another version of God’s Own Country, switching out Yorkshire farmland for coastal waters in North Wales. But that would be unfairly reductive. Like Francis Lee’s smoldering 2017 debut feature, this is a rugged, elemental drama whose slow-burn potency plays out against a landscape as bleak as it is beautiful, where taciturn men are locked into restrictive codes of masculinity set in stone generations ago.
A palpable sense of place, of milieu and of working-class lives in which pleasure, passion and desire have been dulled courses through this atmospherically charged film like the icy seawater and rough currents of the straits. The unerring restraint of its leads never obscures the raw feelings of their sensitively drawn characters.
On the Sea
The Bottom Line
A distinctive drama steeped in melancholy sensuality.
