Year of Release: 2017
Director: Francis Lee
Screenplay: Francis Lee
Starring: Josh O'Connor, Alec Secǎreanu, Gemma Jones, Ian Hart
Running Time: 105 minutes
Genre: Drama, romance
John Saxby (O'Connor) an unhappy Yorkshire farmer lives and works on a farm owned by his ailing father (Hart), with whom John has a difficult relationship, and John's grandmother (Jones). John deals with his angst by nightly binge drinking and casual sexual encounters with random men. Against John's wishes, his father hires Gheorghe (Secǎreanu), a Romanian migrant worker, to help with the lambing season. Despite John and Gheorghe's initial dislike of each other, they form an intense bond.
This is a film in which beauty and brutality, hope and despair exist cheek by jowl. For all the lyrical shots of the beauty of nature, the film does not shy away from the often harsh realities of farming life. John Saxby lives a bleak existence, forced to work the struggling family farm due to his father's ill health and his grandmother's age (his mother having seemingly ran out on the family), and his old friends having apparently gone off to University. John finds release in drinking to oblivion and occasional rough joyless couplings with other men. He is initially resentful of Gheorghe and subjects him to racist verbal abuse. However Gheorghe is seemingly the only person who can reach him, and the tentative building of their relationship is genuinely moving. Josh O'Connor is fantastic in the lead role. Rarely being off the screen, he has to do a lot with very little, speaking volumes with just a fleeting facial expression or sudden downcast eyes. Alec Secǎreanu is affecting as Gheorghe, again conveying a lot with very little, as someone who has been through hell, but still is open to kindness and tenderness. In a post-Brexit Britain, where everything seems to be becoming more divided and more miserable, this is the kind of film that seems more and more essential.
Josh O'Connor and Alec Secǎreanu in God's Own Country
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