Written and directed by Warrington-born Helen Walsh, “On the Sea” is a “yearningly tender” drama about sex and love set in a small fishing community in north Wales, said David Sexton in The New Statesman. Jack (Barry Ward) is a careworn middle-aged man who has spent his whole life here, working for the family mussel-farming business, and the film opens with a “lovely, rhythmic sequence” – showing the work of gathering and cleaning mussels – which “masterfully” establishes the world he inhabits. Jack is married to his teenage sweetheart Maggie (Liz White), with whom he has a wayward son, and has never acknowledged that he is gay. Then he meets Daniel (Lorne MacFadyen), “a hunky young itinerant deckhand” who “has no such qualms about his sexuality”. Soon, they are going out fishing together, and on the sea, they gradually “find a world of their own”.
Shades of “God’s Own Country” and “Brokeback Mountain” “hover above this thoughtful” tale of forbidden love in a tough community, said Kevin Maher in The Times. You might wonder how long we can keep producing dramas that depend for their tension on a level of “foam-flecked homophobia” more redolent of 1960s Wyoming than the UK in 2026. Still, “gay panic” persists in this village, and “On the Sea” amounts to a carefully observed study of “masculinity under pressure”, as Jack must try to “juggle his multiple fragile identities”. There are some pacing issues, said Alex Davidson in Sight and Sound: too much time is devoted to Jack’s relationships with secondary characters. But the connection between the two men is “sensitively portrayed”, the performances are strong, and the film makes excellent use of its Anglesey locations.
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