Director/writer Francis Lee's electrifying feature debut is a working-class, fun-house mirror version of "Call Me By Your Name's" upper-class pretensions and is equally, if not more, rewarding because of it.  Johnny Saxby (a phenomenal Josh O'Connor) runs a struggling small farm in grim northern England, his life made all the more miserable by his dad's stroke-induced impairment and his grandmother's chilly reserve. He can do little right in their eyes, a feeling not totally unearned as Johnny self-medicates via anonymous sex with strangers in the city and by getting blackout drunk. The film opens with him vomiting his guts out.

Dad (Ian Hart) suggests Johnny could use some help around the farm, paving the way for Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu), a Romanian migrant worker, to enter their lives. At first, Johnny is distrustful of Gheorghe, insulting him as a "gypsy," but that dislike is mere cover for a mutual attraction, blossoming into a torrid sexual affair that becomes something much deeper. x

Gheorghe awakens in Johnny a sense of his own self-worth and even an awareness of the beauty around him. One of the movie's best scenes is one with few words, when Gheorge leads Johnny through the countryside, ending up on a hill overlooking the windswept horizon. While the vista might not be the stuff of tropical travel brochures, it has its own rapturously rugged appeal, much like Johnny and Gheorghe.

Lee, who grew up on a farm in West Yorkshire, captures the rhythm and dank earthiness of rural life. This is a rough-hewn, bilious world, full of vomit and sheep's blood, that hasn't been deodorized. A world where the idealized physical attractiveness of "Call Me By Your Name" is as foreign as a skinny dip in the Mediterranean. The bodies here aren't lithe, lean and tan but bruised, broken and pale. Joshua James Richards' cinematography and the score by German ambient duo A Winged Victory for the Sullen help Lee give definition to the drab landscape. The result is a film that, while outwardly a straightforward story of a man finding himself, is a haunting meditation on love blooming in rocky terrain, one that lingers long after the lights have gone up.
 

“The wind pours by like destiny, bending everything in one direction,” American poet Sylvia Plath famously wrote of the Yorkshire Moors, where she once lived with her husband, poet laureate Ted Hughes. “I can feel it trying to funnel my heat away.”

Hughes was born there. Plath’s buried there. In reflecting upon the harsh, elemental poetry of Yorkshire-set “God’s Own Country,” the startlingly assured debut of English writer-director Francis Lee, it’s unsurprising that her words spring more readily to mind than his.



Captured by Lee as an impassively icy wilderness of gray-green clouds and weather-beaten crags, the moorland appears a crushingly lonesome place, perhaps to no one more than Johnny (Josh O’Connor). When we first meet him, the surly young man is retching into a toilet, purging pints he downed the night before at the local watering hole. Resigned to a dreary existence on his family’s scrap of farmland, barely keeping his ailing father (Ian Hart) and grandmother (Gemma Jones) afloat, Johnny has few outlets to express his discontent, save binge-drinking and rough, unemotional sex with strangers against the clanging metal walls of a cattle trailer.

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