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In a remote part of Yorkshire, Johnny Saxby (Josh O’Connor) works on a livestock farm with his father, Martin (Ian Hart), and his grandmother (Gemma Jones). As Martin is recovering from a stroke, they hire an extra pair of hands for the lambing and calving season: the excruciatingly good-looking Romanian, Gheorghe (Alec Secareaunu). Despite Johnny’s initial frostiness (and racism), after a few nights in the moors seeing to the ewes, he and Gheorghe find themselves in a relationship that neither of them suspected with implications that neither of them could have imagined.

So this is a love story. But God’s Own Country is as much about Johnny unlearning the dangerous constraints of an exaggerated and well-practiced masculinity as it is about the tensions of being caught up in an unexpected romance. From the start, what is both impressive and disturbing about Johnny is how his psychology has taught him to make his world – the animals and people he encounters – yield to his will.

Francis Lee, the writer and director, presents the narrative of his debut feature so as to foreground the material causes and consequences of Johnny’s psychology. In the beginning, before Gheorghe arrives, Johnny’s sexual encounters involve the same violence, desperation, and emotional disconnect as the selling of cattle. They even occur in the same venues: in livestock trailers at the market as opposed to intimate or domestic settings. Sex, at this point, is no more than a fleeting transaction, a moment of depersonalised gratification. Johnny returns home, cash in hand, and drinks himself sick at the pub.

For most of the film we don’t actually see much of Yorkshire. Instead, the camera work forces the audience to focus on the same thing that preoccupies Johnny: himself. Early on there is hardly a shot that is not filled with Johnny’s broad, hunched and trudging torso. His world and his home are reduced to an out of focus periphery. When we finally do see the famously stunning landscape it is because Gheorghe has forced Johnny (and allowed us) to look up and out of himself.

As a whole, the film is structured around multiple symbolic reversals with Gheorghe acting as catalyst. Johnny, for example, wants to be in a position to take over the farm from his father. But, as his grandmother reminds him, if it continues to be run this way he is liable to go the same way as Martin, who is now suffering from extreme strokes. Without deterring from a gritty naturalism (which may discomfort viewers unfamiliar with the more brutal aspects of husbandry), Lee allows Martin’s increasingly lifeless body to become both a portent and a kind of somatic expression of the gradual paralysis that is already manifesting itself in Johnny’s psyche. However, by the time that Johnny realises (too late?) how much he needs Gheorghe in order to run the farm his way, he is also willing to bathe his father’s body. What was a symbol for inevitable bodily and mental degradation becomes an occasion for care and hope.

This is a film, then, about bodies and muck – as much as you’d hope from a film about farming – and how our proximity to bodies and muck might be reimagined in a moment of love. Whereas Johnny’s saliva is used as a lubricant at the beginning, later on Gheorghe grabs Johnny’s grazed hand and cleanses it with his spit. At the start a calf that has been born the wrong way around must be put down; later on, a lamb is nursed back to life. Over the course of the film the relations between bodies – other people’s (aging or virile) and animals’ (dead or alive) – are transformed from dispassionate and necessary tolerance to moments of care and intimacy.

But don’t imagine that this makes God’s Own Country somehow predictable or lazily structured. Lee’s film is the best love story you’ll see this year. And it is because of the way he shows how interwoven the varieties and vicissitudes of love (sexual, intergenerational, interspecific, between people and their environment) are that it succeeds.