There’s More to Marriage in ’50s-Set Drama

When “On Swift Horses” played as a secret screening at the Palm Springs Film Festival in January, at least half a dozen people walked out, not because it’s bad, but because a certain contingent of the normally open-minded art-house audience hadn’t signed up for a gay love story. For that reason, it feels like the opposite of a spoiler — something between a consumer service and a selling point — to address what the festival capsules only coyly imply, using phrases like “self-discovery” (Toronto) and “exploring a love she never dreamed possible” (SXSW).

Adapted from the well-regarded novel by Shannon Pufahl, director Daniel Minahan’s period drama explores the challenges of coming out in the 1950s, as two characters attracted not to one another — as those deliberately deceptive plot synopses would have you think — but to members of their own genders. Knowing that allows you to focus not on the clumsy sexual tension suggested between Julius (Jacob Elordi) and his soon-to-be-sister-in-law Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones), but the kinship these misfit souls discover amid a more clandestine era.

Granted, there’s a fleeting chemistry between these two characters when Julius, fresh back from the Korean War, shows up at the door of his older brother Lee (Will Poulter). Muriel first notices him shirtless, stretched out on the hood of his brother’s car, like he’s posing for some kind of Bruce Weber photo shoot (later, seeing him sprawled on the bed of a Reno hotel room, you’d swear Minahan and DP Luc Montpellier were shooting a Calvin Klein commercial, not an edgy Killer Films production).

Julius is one of those omnisexual studs who turns heads anywhere he goes, but striking as Elordi looks, he’s out of his depth emotionally here. Edgar-Jones gives a more nuanced performance, conveying the reticence Muriel feels when Lee proposes marriage and little by little revealing how she emerges into a surer sense of her own…