With Ammonite, Yorkshire-born writer/director Francis Lee offers up his entry to the increasingly-populous canon of female-centred, period-set love stories. Following on from his acclaimed 2017 debut God’s Own Country, Lee relocates from the blustery, rolling moors of his home county which gave that film its setting to the craggy but equally blustery stone Dorset beaches of Lyme Regis to tell a speculative account of a sapphic love affair between real-life 19th-century palaeontologist Mary Anning and geologist Charlotte Murchison.

Ammonite’s foundations in the quasi-truth set it slightly apart from its closest bedfellow in recent cinema — Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady of Fire from 2019 — so it’s worth getting the comparisons out of the way upfront. The two films share a vocabulary in their coastal settings and largely male-free arcs of romantic and professional fulfilment, but Lee foregoes Sciamma’s vibrant colour palettes and meticulous arrangements in favour of muted tones and wilfully messier compositions. Where the heroines of Portrait of a Lady of Fire display their hearts on their sleeves in that distinctly French mode of liberated self-expression, Ammonite sees its characters skirt over the surface in hesitant glances and curt exchanges, burying their innermost passions until they erupt uncontrollably in that repressed, typically English way.

Kate Winslet plays Anning, and Lee builds the straightforward matter-of-factness of Ammonite around the taciturn, stoic performance of his lead. Winslet is gruff, short and direct — wide-stanced with a growling Cornish accent, stomping along stormy beaches in mud-flecked boots in hope of excavating ancient fossils. The tumultuous, wind-battered setting embodies the inner turmoil of the closed-off Anning for the viewer — the fossil-finder is poor and lonely, struggling to earn her keep or to gain recognition in a male-dominated scientific community while her forlorn elderly mother’s (Gemma Jones) health progressively wanes. Lee has a knack for using environments to express what his characters cannot, having done so with the untamed countryside for Josh O’Connor’s volatile farmhand Johnny in God’s Own Country. Winslet does sterling, often spellbinding work, acting mostly through the tightness of her jawline and the sparkle of her eyes which betray Anning’s emotive responses. A period romance veteran, the actress brings a deep understanding of unfulfilled, palpable yearning to a performance more understated than some of her previous turns in the genre.

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Murchison, played by Saoirse Ronan, arrives in Anning’s life at the bequest of her husband Roderick (James McArdle), who hopes his wife may recover from an episode of “melancholia” by way of a new hobby and companion. It is historical fact that Anning and Murchison did indeed establish a long friendship, though Lee takes the opportunity to speculate on that friendship’s nature, given that little has been preserved by way of records that could objectively illuminate on the working class Anning’s inner life. Murchison’s own scientific prestige is notably downplayed, and the casting of 26-year-old Ronan reverses the real-life age difference of the two women to make Ammonite a potent and provocative semi-fiction.

Playing this avatar of Murchison, Ronan is excellent. In early scenes, she is wordless, sickly and doll-like. Roderick may as well be describing his wife when he makes her order for her at dinner of “plain white fish, no sauce.” The couple has suffered a recent bereavement, likely a child, though this is mostly writ in Ronan’s watery eyes and wavering lower lip. In one faltering moment, she begins to laugh at the absurdity of her own feeble condition, but this breaks forth into an uncontrollable torrent of sorrow — a testament to the dexterity of the Lady Bird star’s considerable emergent talent. She stands toe-to-toe with the formidable Winslet, and their hesitant chemistry soon earnestly ignites into breathless catharsis. When Lee turns to the import of Anning’s work, he is preoccupied with the patriarchal tendency to erase her efforts. This is a pertinent thematic discussion, but the significant finagling with Murchison’s own history actively works against it, as much of Charlotte’s personality is evoked in Ronan’s performance rather than the rather light work done on the character in Lee’s own screenplay.

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That said, Ammonite excels in the moments where it relaxes and allows its characters to simply be characters, as on a shimmering, sun drenched morning swim in unusually calm waters, or in a brief vignette in where Ronan giggles sweetly as Winslet recites naughty limericks in the nude. There’s plenty of fun to be had too in appearances by Fiona Shaw as a glamorous alpha-lesbian former lover of Anning’s and God’s Own Country alum Alec Secăreanu as the bashful, awkward doctor who tends to an ailing Charlotte.

Ammonite is a film greatly invested in work, and processes often play out laboriously and in full. Whether it be Anning scraping the dirt from her tools or chipping away at a fossil, these stretches go by in silence other than the film’s exceptional foley work and are shot with an involved reverence. This extends to scenes of both emotional and, later, sexual intimacy which are depicted with the same forensic deference, allowing for these acts and their corresponding feelings to be portrayed with an emotional authenticity that arguably steps in for the historical inaccuracies of the narrative.

Unfussy but effusive, Ammonite feels of a piece with its director’s established milieu. Lee has, over his two films so far, proven a dab hand at teasing out unexpressed, furtive desires, depicting both the visceral emotions and gritty physicality of same-sex romance with empathy and an understated artistic flair. His passion for the natural landscapes of rural England bestows a natural sense of drama on his work which, supported by consummate, involving performances by Winslet and Ronan, makes Ammonite a fresh, earthy take on the period romance.

Rhys Handley (@RhysHandley2113) is a cultural journalist from Doncaster, England. He now lives in South London, where he drinks copious amounts of ginger beer.