God's Own Country (2017): Mud, Cold, and Something Real

The World

Johnny Saxby (Josh O'Connor) works the family farm in the Yorkshire Dales with his father, who has had a stroke, and his grandmother. He drinks at the pub every night, sleeps with whoever is available without warmth or ceremony, and does the work of the farm with the mechanical competence of someone who has never considered that their life might be otherwise.

A Romanian migrant worker, Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu), is hired to help with the lambing. He is competent where Johnny is rough, gentle where Johnny is hard. He knows things about animals that Johnny does not. He does not flinch from Johnny's hostility.

What develops between them, over days of physical labour in difficult weather, is neither romantic nor gentle in its initial stages. It becomes both.

Josh O'Connor

O'Connor — who would later play Prince Charles in The Crown and win an Emmy for it — gives the finest performance of his career as Johnny. The character is, at the film's opening, genuinely unpleasant: closed off, contemptuous, capable of casual cruelty as a default social mode. O'Connor plays this without mitigation and without winking at the audience that things will improve.

The improvement, when it comes, is earned because the starting point was real. The film doesn't ask you to like Johnny before he becomes likeable. It asks you to recognise him — the damage that produces that particular kind of hardness, the defence mechanisms of someone who has never been given permission to want anything — and trust that the recognition is worth something.

Alec Secareanu

Gheorghe is the film's moral centre and its mystery: a man who sees Johnny clearly and chooses to stay anyway, who has his own history and his own damage and has decided not to let it shape him in the same way. Secareanu plays him with a quiet authority that makes his choice to remain legible without making it explained.

He is also very beautiful, in the specific way of someone whose beauty is inseparable from their competence and their ease with physical reality. The scenes of Gheorghe working — with animals, with soil, with the simple materials of a farming life — are some of the film's most erotic, because desire in God's Own Country is not separate from the physical world but part of it.

The Sex

The film is explicit, and its explicitness is different in quality from the explicitness in most gay cinema. The sex between Johnny and Gheorghe is initially rough — the power dynamics of two men who haven't found their way to tenderness — and becomes, over the course of the film, something else: an expression of the specific vulnerability of being known by someone.

The change is in the quality of attention during the physical scenes, not in their content. Haigh understood this in Weekend; Francis Lee, who studied Haigh's film carefully, understands it here.

The Landscape

The Yorkshire Dales in late winter — grey light, stone walls, the particular quality of cold that is wet rather than dry — is shot by Joshua James Richards with a beauty that refuses consolation. This is not picturesque countryside. It is working land, difficult and specific, and its difficulty is part of the film's argument: that love, here, is not a matter of warmth and Italian summer but of choosing to stay in hard conditions because the person is worth the hardship.

The Ending

God's Own Country ends with Johnny running — not away from something but toward, for the first time in the film — in a manner that is as close to pure joy as the film's vocabulary permits. It is not the dancing-in-the-street joy of Beautiful Thing. It is the joy of someone who has not previously known what the word meant, moving toward the thing that is teaching him.

It is, in its own muddy way, as good an ending as any film on this list.

Why It Matters for BoysDo

BoysDo is a platform that believes the male body, and gay desire, deserve serious aesthetic attention regardless of the setting. *God's Own Country* takes that belief to its most demanding test: can gay desire be treated as serious, as beautiful, as worthy of attention, in a film set on a Yorkshire sheep farm in February?

The answer is yes. Unambiguously, muddy, cold-breathed yes.