On the Sea      Director: Helen WalshCert: NoneStarring: Barry Ward, Lorne MacFadyen, Liz White, Henry Lawfull, Celyn Jones, Danny Webb, Leisa GwenllianRunning Time: 1 hr 51 minsBarry Ward, versatile Dubliner, makes the best of a meaty role in this consistently grim drama set among hard-edged fisherman in north Wales. There is a cheap temptation to make a comparison with Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country or Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain. The time is, perhaps, past for tracing all queer romances set in rural spaces back to such sources but, even without the same-sex romance, On the Sea shares an oblique connection with the Lee classic. If you scrunch up your eyes and short-circuit your imagination, this film also plays a little like a revisionist western. This is a patriarchal space. Families huddle close. When a stranger rides into town, trouble quickly ensues. (The shortage of mobile phones or related tech makes that comparison with a period genre easier still to sustain.)Ward, sporting a Welsh accent that convinces these ears, plays the troubled Jack, an untravelled man, long married to a childhood sweetheart who runs a mussel business with his gruff, unforgiving brother, Dyfan (Celyn Jones). It soon becomes clear that the two siblings are involved in constant friction. Dyfan, who is intent on taking over and yielding to modernity, believes that Jack is too easy-going on their sons. All this while Jack is doing his best to deal with recent remission from cancer.The grey clouds close down. The rain hammers. Evenings in the pub are punctuated by random brawls. An older fisherman (Danny Webb, in the Walter Brennan role from our parallel western) has a leg amputated following an incident involving Jack’s son and ends up as grumpy chorus to the continuing action. Nothing here speaks to the lighter pleasures of life’s rich pageant. The closest thing to relief (and it’s not that close) comes when Jack runs into a wandering stranger named Daniel (Lorne MacFadyen, excellent). He helps out on the oldster’s boat. They chop firewood. Close to halfway through the action – slow-burn, indeed – the two end up having sex in Daniel’s unprepossessing caravan.As directed by Helen Walsh, who made the fine The Violators in 2015, On the Sea cannot be faulted for the strength of its performance, the honesty of its emotions or its sense of place. Filmed in Anglesey, the images are soaked in as much convincing brine as floated Mark Jenkin’s recent Rose of Nevada. All the characters look as if they’ve been brought up blinking through the sort of mist that rusts human joints.Much rests on Ward’s shoulder, and he proves up to the task. From the beginning there is a sense of a man shouldering both worries he acknowledges and suppressed needs that he does not. There is no real sense of relief when he and Daniel get together, just an acceptance of an unstoppable inevitability. Particular mention should be made of Liz White as Jack’s patient and ultimately misused wife. A busy TV actor, White here powerfully conveys a woman belatedly allowing herself to accept painful truths. Celyn Jones is a wall of unreason as the calculating homophobic brother. Walsh’s screenplay is open to no easy solutions or false epiphanies. The emotional honesty is strikingly raw. For all that, it is hard to avoid the awful critical cliche that speaks of something being “easier to admire than enjoy”. There is barely a minute of levity in a film keenly aware that this community and every human within it are living on different amounts of borrowed time (Jack, at the start, reveals some worrying symptoms to his doctor). On the Sea is a brave work, rich in awkward truths, that closes around the viewer like a unforgiving squall.In cinemas from Friday, July 24th