26/03/2026 - Helen Walsh’s sensitive, closely observed drama finds a middle-aged fishery worker belatedly discovering his queerness

Anglesey, an island off the north-west coast of Wales, is pretty, hard to travel to and a bit overlooked, but it’s more than getting by. It’s where family man Jack (Barry Ward, whose career took off with Ken Loach’s Jimmy’s Hall), his brother Dyfan (Celyn Jones) and their gaggle of sons work in the fishing trade, scanning the shallow seawater for mussels, which are destined for London’s posh restaurants. Austerity and social decline have spared this place for now, with the fishing industry sustaining it for generations, although traditional attitudes reign, and the nearby church is filled to the pews each weekend. This fact makes it both impressive and sad that Jack has managed to hide his buried queerness.

As independent British film goes, acclaimed novelist-turned-director Helen Walsh has selected a familiar setting and précis for her second feature, On the Sea, showing this week at BFI Flare after a debut at the relaunched Edinburgh International Film Festival led to appearances at Thessaloniki and Palm Springs. Yet with its hypnotic, environmentally attuned lensing from DoP Sam Goldie and its deeply committed performances, it’s rewarding to have another variation on this story. Overall, it’s a reminder that despite this era of queer visibility, a person’s sexuality (and the confidence required to express it) needs patience in order to be fully unearthed, and even to become clear to oneself. Amidst Jack’s repetitive, yet grounding, life on the mussel beds and scallop dredgers, and in relative domestic harmony with his dressmaker wife, Maggie (Liz White), he has ably suppressed his true self.

In the pub one evening, Jack locks eyes with Daniel (Lorne MacFadyen), a handyman who’s in town for itinerant work, and who enjoys an unrooted existence as he travels along the coast in a caravan. With a handful of matters unsettling Jack’s peace as he enters middle age, such as the likely modernisation of his business with Dyfan, and his son Tom (Henry Lawfull) showing resistance to following in his professional footsteps, he finds himself naturally drawn to this new, handsome stranger, with tentative, but meaningful, conversation eventually leading to intimacy. If there’s an aspect of Walsh’s filmmaking that mirrors her award-winning success in popular fiction, it’s in the avoidance of a typical three-act structure, and a focus on unresolved depictions of the self: each plot event, or turn, feels held a beat longer than normal, gaining in depth from what it loses in brisk narrative economy.

On the Sea fits perfectly on a spectrum between Mark Jenkin’s work, which eerily evokes the Cornish seafront’s past, present and future, and God’s Own Country, with its uniquely rural British look at queer life and isolation. It’s still lacking some distinguishing and more dynamic elements that would make it stand out at festivals and even when the time comes for its eventual domestic theatrical release, yet its sensitivity, and the lived-in perspective that Walsh provides, is still very welcome.

On the Sea is a UK production, staged by Red Union Films. Its world sales are handled by The Yellow Affair.