★★★
(MA) 104 minutes

British cinema has long been known for its homely grubbiness and God's Own Country suggests a determination to keep the reputation alive. This debut feature from writer-director Francis Lee is billed as a romance, and so it is – but it's the kind where the very first scene shows the main character in a bathroom throwing up.

Johnny Saxby (Josh O'Connor), a young man living with his parents on a sheep farm in Yorkshire, is at first sight an unpromising hero. He keeps his head down and wears a sullen expression – though from early on he shows signs of a gentler side, evident more when he's dealing with animals than when he's casually hooking up with men.

His glumness echoes the world around him: Lee's handheld camera dwells on the grubby details of farm work and on bare landscapes under dingy skies. This is a place where people don't waste words and are prone to saying things like "don't talk wet".

For all Johnny's inarticulacy, it's clear he's a troubled soul (as well as an alcoholic) with a good deal of latent anger. The issue is less his sexuality, which he treats matter-of-factly, than the bigger question of what his life will become – especially as his parents are in denial about the farm being in financial strife.

Hope arrives in the form of Gheorghe​ (Alec Secareanu), a Romanian migrant worker who takes a temporary job on the farm. It isn't long before he and Johnny find a connection, but the question remains whether full commitment is possible, or even imaginable, on either side.

God's Own Country has been compared to Brokeback Mountain, but a more interesting double bill would be with the French director Andre Techine's recent Being 17 – another rural gay love story, though one where the characters are younger and more conflicted.

Techine's film is sunnier in every sense, as well as a good deal livelier. Still, God's Own Country is hard to fault on its own terms and earns the assumption that lies behind any worthwhile movie romance, that love can take root even in the most unlikely soil.