By DAILY MAIL REPORTER
Published: | Updated:
Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor star in this touching romance that starts in 1917
Year: 2025
Certificate: 15
This poignant historical romance stars two of the hottest male actors of recent years, both of whom started out on British TV before securing Hollywood leading man status. Paul Mescal made his name in Bafta-winning series Normal People and starred in Ridley Scott’s 2024 epic Gladiator II while Josh O’Connor, who you might remember from The Durrells or The Crown (he played Prince Charles), starred in Steven Spielberg’s 2026 sci-fi mystery Disclosure Day.
This is not a big crowd-pleasing blockbuster but a much quieter film which many have compared to Brokeback Mountain. It’s a film that, like Ang Lee’s 2005 Oscar winner, deals with the challenges and secrecy of being gay in rural America and similarly casts two established straight actors in the roles of its gay leads. But that is about where the comparisons end.
Mescal and O’Connor play Lionel and David, two music students who meet and become lovers in 1917 while studying at the New England Conservatory of Music, forging a deep bond over their shared love of folk music. Reuniting after the war, the two men travel across America, making recordings of traditional songs from across the wide open country. That trip forms lasting memories that will define their lives, long after they have parted ways, and that are imprinted on them just as the music they recorded on wax cylinders also lives on.
It’s a film that is absolutely beautiful to look at and to listen to, but it could have done with a little less restraint and formalism, and a little more passion. (128 minutes)
