Swoony Sunday Film Review: "God's Own Country"
This beautiful, haunting, and sometimes melancholy film shows that queer joy and love can flourish in the most unlikely of places.
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Warning: Full spoilers for the film follow.
God’s Own Country is one of those gay films that I’ve been meaning to watch for a very long time. It’s hard to say exactly what’s kept me from taking the plunge and watching it, except perhaps for the fact that I’m one of those people who needs to be in the right emotional frame of mind to watch a gay romantic drama, particularly one that’s been billed as Brokeback Mountain but in Yorkshire. Sometimes you just want to be in the right frame of mind, you know? You have to make sure that the feels will hit you just right.
It turns out that Pride Month 2025 was just the right moment to watch this film. I was captivated and touched, heartwarmed and heartbroken. And, because the film is so clearly in conversation with Brokeback Mountain–from its themes to its setting–it also, in some important ways, helped me to grapple with the way that that earlier film continues to break my heart with its bleak and melancholy depiction of mid-20th century American homophobia and queer heartbreak.
Josh O’Connor gives one of the best and most moving performances of his career as Johnny Saxby. His father, Martin (Ian Hart) has suffered a debilitating stroke, which means that it falls to Johnny to keep the farm running, which he begrudgingly does while carrying on flings with men. The arrival of Romanian migrant worker Gheorghe (Alec Secăreanu) changes everything, and once they are up on the Yorkshire moors–alone with the sheep and with the wind and the wild–their true feelings begin to come to the surface. Though the world throws up various impediments to their relationship, including Martin having another, even more devastating, stroke, the two eventually find their way back to one another, forging a future that will be happier, and more stable, for both of them.
O’Connor really does excel at playing tormented but beautiful young men. When we first meet him, Johnny is a man of few words and deeply-sublimated feelings, and it’s clear from his interactions with everyone–whether that be his father, his grandmother Deidre (an always fantastic Gemma Jones) or his friend from high school–that he carries around a lot of resentment. It’s only once he meets Gheorghe that things begin to change and, slowly but surely, he comes to realize that his feelings for men might lead to something more than just a few stolen moments in a trailer. Watching their love flourish and grow is a function both of the actors’ performances, with O’Connor seeming to physically transform from a grouchy adolescent to a more well-adjusted adult but also the screenplay. Theirs is a love forged amid the strange and bleak Eden of the Yorkshire moors, and the physical consummation of their love is at times both rough and yet tender, as the two men struggle to find their rhythm.
While O’Connor often receives the lion’s share of the praise for his embodied and bluntly beautiful performance in God’s Own Country, Alec Secăreanu is just as brilliant as Gheorghe. There’s a softness and a kindness to his eyes that draws you in immediately, and the pairing of this with his obvious tenderness toward the sheep–he saves a runty lamb, nurses it back to health, and eventually encourages another ewe to take it in–makes him irresistible to both Johnny and the audience alike. Gheorghe, like Johnny, is often a man of few words, but he’s also much more in-tune with his feelings and with his wants and ambitions than his lover, which leads to no small amount of tension between the two men, particularly once Johnny starts to imagine what their future together might be like.
God’s Own Country is one of those films which thrums with a powerful emotional authenticity. It draws you in with remarkable efficiency, allowing you to understand these young men and, to an extent, the world from which they have emerged. For Johnny, the life of a Yorkshire farmer has left hardly any room for him to really explore his feelings or his desires or what he might want out of his life, while for Gheorghe the life of an itinerant laborer means that all of his relationships, no matter how deep and poignant, are almost certainly fated to be ephemeral. In one of the film’s most devastating moments, he tells Johnny that his own country is a nation of old people, with little to offer young men like himself. This, along with Johnny’s own reluctance to fully commit, helps to explain his own reluctance to allow himself to imagine a future with the other man.
Yet for all of the heartache and the difficulty, God’s Own Country is also replete with many moments of warmth and connection. There are, of course, the much commented on sex scenes in all of their muddy viscerality, but there are also softer moments, as when Johnny and Gheorghe share an intimate moment in front of the telly while Deirdre irons clothes behind them. There’s an ease and a familiarity to both actors’ performances that allows you to really believe that you are watching two young men forging a love and a bond that nothing will ever be able to truly break.
One of the most striking things about God’s Own Country is just how little homophobia there is in this world. When Johnny’s grandmother returns from the hospital and finds a used condom, she seems more frustrated at her grandson’s carelessness than at gay sex. Indeed, both Martin and Deirdre seem to see what it takes Johnny a bit too long to recognize: that Gheorghe makes him happy and that, if he is only willing and able to put aside his hangups, he can quite possibly forge a lovely little gay future here in Yorkshire. The scene in which father and son reach and accord is one that struck me right in the feels, the moment in which Deirdre gives Johnny a slip of paper with Gheorghe’s new place of employment on it is likewise beautiful and sweet. In these ways, the film engages with Brokeback Mountain, offering a world that is more optimistic and hopeful than its predecessor. There might be more than a bit of xenophobia in this distant part of Britain, but it’s clear that, with their family behind them, Johnny and Gheorghe can still manage to forge their own hard-won future together.
The ending, too, seems to be in an unspoken conversation with Brokeback Mountain. While the 2004 film ends with Ennis still grieving the loss of his beloved Jack–even as he also seems to have come to some sort of peace with his complicated feelings–God’s Own Country ends with the two men dispatching the trailer in which Gheorghe has been living and walking into the house together. I was reminded a bit of the ending of Maurice–both the novel and the film–which similarly ends with two men finding their own little slice of happiness in the rustic life.
Perhaps it’s because I am, at heart, a country boy, but something about this ending really pierced me. The sweeping hills Yorkshire, after all, aren’t all that different from the ridges of Appalachia where I was raised and, as is almost always the case with movies like this, I feel a rush of joy, and perhaps also a bit of melancholy, that the younger me didn’t have access to films like this one. All the same, there is so much potent queer joy in God’s Own Country, and my only regret is that I didn’t watch it sooner.