It’s tempting to describe English novelist-turned-filmmaker Helen Walsh’s fine-grained gay love story On the Sea as another version of God’s Own Country, switching out Yorkshire farmland for coastal waters in North Wales. But that would be unfairly reductive. Like Francis Lee’s smoldering 2017 debut feature, this is a rugged, elemental drama whose slow-burn potency plays out against a landscape as bleak as it is beautiful, where taciturn men are locked into restrictive codes of masculinity set in stone generations ago.
A palpable sense of place, of milieu and of working-class lives in which pleasure, passion and desire have been dulled courses through this atmospherically charged film like the icy seawater and rough currents of the straits. The unerring restraint of its leads never obscures the raw feelings of their sensitively drawn characters.
The middle-aged protagonist, Jack (Barry Ward), and his younger brother Dyfan (Celyn Jones) co-own a mussel farm, a hardscrabble enterprise being squeezed by larger commercial fisheries. Jack and Dyfan are the third generation of men in their family to endure the backbreaking work of hand-raking the mussel beds and crating their haul each day in bitterly cold winds. The attention to quotidian labor in harsh conditions at times calls to mind Luchino Visconti’s classic 1948 neorealist docudrama about dirt-poor Sicilian fishermen, La Terra Trema.
Friction between the brothers sits just under the surface from the start. Dyfan’s three boys pitch in with the work, unlike Jack’s surly teenage son Tom (Henry Lawfull), a repeated no-show. When Jack sends his brother’s youngest home because his hands are too frozen to be of use, Dyfan takes understated jabs at his manhood by saying he’s too soft on the lads, none more so than Tom. Dyfan later shows resentment about having kept the business afloat solo while Jack was undergoing treatment for cancer, now in remission. Theirs is not an easy fraternity.
When an incident for which Tom is indirectly responsible leads to old-timer Bernie (Danny Webb), who makes a living from his scallop dredger, having his leg amputated, Jack takes charge of the veteran fisherman’s care. He gets help — at first through his firm insistence, later voluntarily — from itinerant deckhand Daniel (Lorne MacFadyen); they chop firewood to heat Bernie’s home and take his boat out to make money to pay his bills.
The attraction between the two men at first is so veiled it’s almost undetectable, though Daniel is more obvious with his glances and the hints he drops into their terse conversations. Irish actor Ward (who played the title character in Jimmy’s Hall for Ken Loach) expertly conveys the unease of a man reading and responding to the stranger’s signals even as he feigns indifference, fearful of disrupting his life in a community suspicious of any digression from old-fashioned norms.
Paradoxically, it takes Daniel smacking Jack in the mouth after he allows the younger man to be humiliated in the pub to spur Jack into acting on his desires. The sex between them is fumbling, nervous and almost feral at first, then increasingly tender and uninhibited as they start stealing time together in Daniel’s trailer. When the connection between them intensifies, Daniel becomes unsatisfied with clandestine hookups, wanting more, while Jack’s self-denial and wariness of potential exposure are tough habits to kick.
“This is my town,” Jack tells Daniel by way of explanation. “I live here.” But no less affecting is Daniel’s frustration when he asks of their relationship, “What is this?” The emotional inarticulacy of both men is quietly bruising.
A million conflicts play across Ward’s face, notably Jack’s longing for a more fulfilling life and the sudden reminder that, had he made more courageous choices, that might have been an option. In a scene of crushing sadness, he sees Daniel playing pool at the pub with another man, the intimacy of their body language unmistakable.
Jack’s biggest regret, however, is the hurt he stands to cause Maggie (Liz White), the wife he has genuinely loved since they were high school sweethearts. That hurt becomes an increasing inevitability once Dyfan starts making pointed comments about Jack’s younger friend helping him take care of Bernie despite hardly knowing the old man, or Jack and Daniel taking Bernie’s boat out for the day, with no evidence of any fishing being done.
That homophobic Dyfan chooses to drop these insinuations over a dinner with his brother and their wives makes his behavior especially toxic, not to mention that his spite is driven in part by his maneuverings to buy out Jack’s share of the business.
Walsh is an assured storyteller, aided considerably by the gritty textures and searching close-ups of DP Sam Goldie’s camera, which shapes an alternate landscape from Jack’s lined, stubbly face, his calloused hands, bulky wool sweaters and water-slicked rubber waders. The cloudy skies cast much of the film in shadow, the chief exception being a rare patch of sunlight seen from underwater during a swim off Bernie’s boat. Or is it a memory of a much earlier time on holiday with Maggie, when she first had an inkling of her husband’s secret?
Unfolding to the regionally inflected sounds of Felix Rösch’s delicate score, On the Sea takes some unsurprising turns, sketched out in foreshadowing, but also less expected developments, particularly once Maggie gets past her anger and her rock-solid strength of character kicks in. Tom, too, after keeping a hostile distance from his father, makes a late display of loyalty that silences his uncle. And a scene in which Tom’s girlfriend (Leisa Gwenllian) exchanges friendly words with Jack at his most isolated is lovely.
Walsh is too subtle in her writing to concoct a happy ending in which everything falls into place. But there’s comfort and even a kind of peaceful deliverance in the stirring closing images of a film that stays with you.
