13/05/2025 - Will Seefried’s debut film navigates between romanticism and horror amidst experiments to cure homosexuality in the early 20th century

It’s a strange encounter that we witness at the beginning of Lilies Not for Me, American director Will Seefried’s first work which was screened in competition in the 9th Riviera International Film Festival - Sestri Levante (running 6 – 11 May) after premiering in the Edinburgh Festival. A nurse and a young patient sit facing one another in an empty, grey room – in front of a table offering a spread of bread, cheese and fruit, “to make it seem more real” – and are pretending to be meeting for the first time and to want to get to know each other better. In reality, we’re in a psychiatric hospital and the “illness” which this young man is suffering from is none other than homosexuality, a condition which, in 1920s England, someone tried to cure by way of injections, therapy and simulated dates with the opposite sex, such as the afore-mentioned encounter, but also through vile experiments involving testicle transplants, based on the belief that attraction to people of the same sex was purely physical rather than psychological, and so the body needed to be “liberated” accordingly.

A journey to the uppermost limits of horror involved in one of the darkest chapters in the history of homophobia - and of humanity itself - is what’s offered up here by Seefried, who also wrote the screenplay based on real life events. “How does it all start?” asks Dorothy, the empathic nurse played by British actress Erin Kellyman, to her indomitable patient, Owen (Irish actor Fionn O’Shea, who won the IFTA Award for his part in the series Normal People), who’s being forced against his will to undergo this ludicrous treatment in order “to become a healthy man”. The road which brought Owen - a sensitive gay writer who’s comfortable with his sexual urges - from his idyllic life in the countryside to this cold institution is subsequently reconstructed through a series of flashbacks which dynamically intersect with the present for the full duration of the film (whose careful editing was entrusted to Julia Bloch).

It all begins like a story of forbidden love, full of emotion and poetry (and by the producers of Call Me By Your Name [+see also:
trailer
Q&A: Luca Guadagnino
film profile], according to the trailer). Owen receives a visit from an old school friend called Phillip (Brit Robert Aramayo) to whom he was attracted 15 years earlier and vice versa. Having become a doctor in the meantime, and clearly uncomfortably with his own sexual orientation, Phillip talks to his long-lost friend about a possible cure for people like them. But this research interest seems to fade into the background when the two of them decide to give free rein to their passion (“first, I want to know what it’s like to be together”), far away from everyone and ensconced by nature. Their idyll ends with the arrival of a lone, desperate man (Nicholas Pauling), who unwillingly plays a part in Phillip’s perverse experiments, and then in those of another young man called Charles (Germany’s Louis Hofmann), which ultimately upsets the subsequently fragile balance between the two friends, who are custodians of and are also complicit in an unspeakable secret.

Not everything is plausible in this film (the haste with which the surgery - which is central to the plot - is carried out, for example), but it does fully engage the viewer thanks to the intense performances delivered by its two actors, the fascinating contrast between beauty and horror, and the shocking, true story it reveals: the doctor who carried out testicle transplants at the time, with a view to correcting sexual orientation (Austrian physiologist Eugen Steinach), was nominated for the Nobel Prize no less than six times before his work was finally discredited.

Lilies Not for Me was produced by Wolflight Films (headquartered in Los Angeles and Cape Town) and Paradise City UK alongside Memento (France), with the latter also handling world sales.

(Translated from Italian)