There are many outstanding things in writer-director Francis Lee’s remarkable first feature, and prime among them is the sense that nature herself has a distinct presence in the story. It brings home how rarely we see life on the land depicted in British cinema with any credibility. God's Own Country is a gloriously naturalistic depiction of the harsh life of farming, of an existence based on close connection to animals and to the earth, set in the Yorkshire countryside in which the director grew up. For a comparable sense of connection to the rural environment, and of the sheer back-breaking work that comes with that link, we have to look elsewhere – to Zola perhaps, or Italian neorealism.
Closer to home there’s much in God's Own Country that resonates with DH Lawrence, his sense of the primal rhythms of life and death, and the way in which the emotions of these working lives are often expressed with a minimum of language. Lawrence has a poem titled “Love on the Farm”, which could work as an alternative title for Lee’s film – except that love is as far from the mind of its main character, twentysomething Johnny Saxby (played by Josh O'Connor), when we first encounter him as anything could be. In an early scene his grandmother catches his character perfectly when she calls him a “mardy arse”, local vernacular for his being moodily withdrawn (it was a nickname that Lawrence was called at school).
The sense of change feels somehow primal
It’s a world in which communication, particularly within the family, is virtually monosyllabic: the first words we hear Johnny speak, some minutes into the film, he addresses to a heifer, and he’s just had his hand inside her to check on her calf (we see a lot of hands exploring animals’ orifices in God's Own Country: Lee made his actors learn such tasks for themselves, no hand doubles here). With his father Martin (Ian Hart) in poor health, Johnny carries the responsibility for the farm on his shoulders, and there’s little else in his life to give it meaning. The fact that he’s gay isn’t an issue in itself – though it’s not spoken of at home – but sex has the same purely physical dimension as the drink he stupefies himself with at the pub every night. When he takes a cow to market, he has a cold fuck with a man who’s obviously an acquaintance, but the idea of continuing any human contact after the act is completed is alien to him.
Johnny’s world is a lonely one: his mother disappeared south at some stage in the past, unable to deal with the isolation and hardship of the farm. Grandmother Deidre (Gemma Jones, playing well beyond her accustomed range) has a sort of scolding affection for him, but she’s more than reserved with her emotions. A childhood friend has come back home for her university holidays – she notices how Johnny has changed, no longer “funny, like you used to be” – and suggests they have a night out in Bradford. When Johnny mentions the idea to his dad, the latter looks at him like he was talking about the moon.
All of which makes the arrival of an outsider an unwelcome disruption. Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu) has come from Romania to help for a few weeks with the lambing – he was the only applicant for the job – and Johnny’s hostility is immediate as he taunts him as a “gyppo”. They are going up to the higher pastures for the lambing, to sleep in a ruined hut and subsist, it seems, entirely on pot noodles. Then up there, when least expected, fate stumbles in: in this stark isolation the hostility between the two men turns into something else, Johnny’s anger giving way to tussling, and that into physical contact. At first they fight in the mud, rutting like animals, before a deeper contact slowly grows between them. They may still guy one another, but their words – “freak”, “faggot” – are no longer insults, rather signifiers of an new, joshing intimacy.
Lee convinces us of this changing dynamic with absolute filmic subtlety. There’s a sense that the bleak beauty of their surroundings, to which Gheorghe is receptive, has started to infect Johnny too, as does the sheer gentleness of the outsider. We see the Romanian bring the runt of a litter back to life and then, in a truly beautiful scene, coat it in the pelt of a dead lamb so that the mother sheep will allow it to suckle.
All of this is conveyed with such tenderness, expressed far more through images than in the very spare words of Lee’s script (his minimal use of music, principally tracks by A Winged Victory for the Sullen, is also all the more powerful for its sparseness). The sense of change feels somehow primal: simply, the two men come down from the hills different people. Johnny has started to feel things that he never knew he could, while for Gheorghe – everything we hear about his back story and homeland is unremittingly pessimistic, “My country is dead” – the possibility of settling, rather than wandering may have become real.
For these two who have felt so out of place in their different worlds, the chance to create a home has suddenly appeared, but Lee’s closing reel will test everything. Johnny, although capable of being surprised by joy, remains his own worst enemy: Josh O'Connor’s face has a remarkable, somehow lopsided vulnerability that conveys all that, and more. In these troubled days of Brexit, it’s salutary to find an outsider portrayed with such total respect. However he may have acquired it – most likely, we guess, though the school of hard knocks – Gheorghe has a self-awareness, and a self-sufficiency, that is both beyond his own years, and aeons beyond Johnny's.
Cinematographer Joshua James Richards portrays these landscapes, these faces with a subtle, surprise beauty that matches Lee’s pacing of his emotional narrative. It’s somehow cyclical, how from the barren earth of winter a new harvest will come forth; over the film’s closing credits we see just that, home-movie archive scenes of harvests past. There’s no praising God's Own Country too highly. Francis Lee may have come out of nowhere, but if we see another film as good this year, we will be lucky.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for God's Own Country
The crux of the central face-off remains. The adult Una is flicking one day through a trade magazine – quite why is never explained – when she sees a photo of the man, Ray (Ben Mendelsohn, a terrific actor who should be a bigger star than he is), who led her incipiently teenage self into an abusive, not to mention illegal relationship. Interestingly, the preyed-upon Una was 12 in the play, but perhaps adding a year to the character makes a difference in celluloid funding circles. (Rooney Mara, Ben Mendelsohn, pictured below)
When Andrews and Harrower keep to the confines of the material’s essential dynamic, you see vestiges of the nascent power of the piece. Has Ray – who has done time in prison and started life anew with both a wife (Natasha Little) and a new name – put the past behind him? Has Una, and, indeed, can she? The precise reason for Una’s intrepid reacquaintance with Ray is itself properly elusive: vengeance per se doesn’t adequately describe what is afoot.
The accused is a demure little thing who, long before her husband’s death, was already in mourning for the termination of her career as an actress. A series of flashbacks establish that Lizzie has risen to gentility from the poorest circumstances. Her mother turned a blind eye to the molestations of randy old pervs. Orphaned, she drifts towards the local music hall, a place of magical enchantment staffed by dwarves and trapeze artistes, presided over by the celebrated cross-dressing Dan Leno (Douglas Booth, pictured above with Olivia Cooke) and his managerial sidekick known as Uncle (Eddie Marsan in a bald wig).
It’s curious to witness Bill Nighy play someone so intensely buttoned up (Kildare’s rumoured homosexuality goes for nothing). The role was originally destined for the late Alan Rickman, and it’s possible to imagine what he might have done with it. Nighy turns in a gimlet-eyed tribute performance which is shorn of all his trademark tics and tricks and doesn’t quite compute. As Leno, Booth channels his inner Russell Brand without conveying the hypnotic appeal that, you assume, was his signature. Daniel Mays plays a PC Plod turn he could do in his sleep. There’s a nice turn from María Valverde (pictured above) as a smouldering other woman.
Then there’s the mysterious heavy metal-goth who lives in a shack in the woods near the cemetery. He barely talks but knows how to mix a track and play guitar. He says he’s the anti-Christ and calls himself Basterd; it goes with his white contact lenses à la Marilyn Manson. Basterd’s played by African-American actor Mamoudou Athie (last seen playing Grandmaster Flash in Baz Luhrman's hiphop saga, The Get Down). Basterd's character evolves and he becomes more than just a memeber of Patti’s band (pictured above). 
The other guests may be waiting for the end, but that doesn’t stop them enjoying more everyday routines, among which is an unlikely evening television show titled Flying Saucer. Daya establishes a particular bond with Vimla (Navnindra Behl), a widow who had accompanied her late husband here years ago and has stayed on ever since. There’s much affectionate humour in their interaction: there’s a moment when Daya appears to be on his deathbed, surrounded by mourners and musicians, with Vimla trying to catch his last words. “What did he say?” a musician asks. “That you sing in tune, please,” she replies.
Throughout the film an iPod shuffle soundtrack is deployed drawn from the Grand Theft Auto playlist, turning every action sequence into an oh-so-ironic music video. Foreigner’s "I Want to Know What Love Is" plays out against slo-mo slaughter at a funeral (complete with flying canapés and corpses); grating heavy metal enhances torture by a tattooed henchman; Ram Jam’s version of "Black Betty" provides the earworm for a chain-choking scene in a hardware store. Unfortunately, in the wake of Baby Driver with its niftily executed marriage of music to action, The Hitman’s Bodyguard fails to hit any new beats. 
When not involved in chasing and shooting, the two leads settle down to lengthy exposition on their lives (cue a dirge-like flashback to formative childhood traumas designed to engender sympathy for Kincaid's career choice as paid killer). Our heroes debate their relative moral superiority: ‘Who is more wicked? He who kills the evil motherfuckers or he who protects them?’; but even more turgid is the endless banter about romance and Bryce's regrests about losing his Interpol sweetheart (Elodie Yung). 