Who remembers the last time they went to a house party? Piling into ramshackle tenement houses which strain at the seams to hold the weight of dozens of sweaty bodies pressed against each other, necking warm tins of supermarket beer, swapping cigarettes and stories with strangers in the back garden — all experiences once mundanely familiar, now consigned to a seemingly distant and unreachable past. Watching such scenes unfold through a laptop screen in Steve McQueen’s novelette-like feature Lovers Rock, it’s only natural to feel an ache of melancholy and sentimentality. That director and co-writer McQueen folds a multilayered negotiation of the intersections of Black oppression, sexual politics and British historical injustice into this euphoric, sensory experience — and an abstract, absorbing experience it truly is — serves as testament to the filmmaker’s considerable command of his craft.

Lovers Rock is one of five entries in McQueen’s Small Axe film anthology, which depicts historical moments, half-remembered memories and totemic figureheads from the Black British experience. Two installments — the John Boyega-starring police drama Red, White and Blue and the courtroom thriller Mangrove featuring Letitia Wright — have already premiered on the festival circuit, commended for their searing, level-headed assessments of the socio-political complexities of existing as a Black person in the UK. Lovers Rock takes a more laid-back approach to the anthology’s raison d’être, centering on communal joy, personal liberation and easy camaraderie while allowing unease and danger to loom quietly at the edges.

It’s Saturday night in Ladbroke Grove, West London, and a party is about to start. It’s probably sometime in the 1980s, given the fashion choices curated impeccably by production designer Helen Scott. No point is made to illuminate viewers as to who exactly is throwing this party or how the guests pouring in are connected to one another. The one clear thing the burgeoning crowd shares is the colour of their skin, and many speak with a blend of old-London cockney and Jamaican Patois that implies they are children of the Windrush generation who came to the UK amid the country’s postwar prosperity and found their dreams dashed by a grim, racist reality.

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The DJ is cranking dub vinyls up loud while the headcount is still in single figures. A jubilant gaggle of middle-aged ladies are cooking curried goat in the kitchen. Cans of Red Stripe and bottles of Cherry B are £1. McQueen keeps his camera frenetically in motion, while cinematographer Shabier Kirchner drenches soft, hazy edges around the setting’s orange hue. It all serves to keep the audience excitedly unsettled while recognizing faces and voices, but it’s hard to take full grip on a narrative in these early scenes of giddy anticipation.

A central cast gradually takes shape, though. Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn portrays Martha, a girl from a good Christian family who tosses her white heels out the window and scales down a drainpipe to rush for the bus with her friend Patty (Shaniqua Okwok). At the party, Martha catches the eye of the charming, thick-accented Franklyn (Michael Ward) and dodges the unsolicited affections of the nattily-suited, overbearing Reggie (Francis Lovehall). It’s low-stakes stuff, personal and inconsequential, but all the lovelier for it as McQueen maintains an undercurrent of dread in sporadic cuts to the leering white lads loitering on the street outside. This party is clearly a safe haven from a day-to-day life of social exclusion, racial discrimination, economic uncertainty and physical danger for the young Black people in attendance, making its wanton debauchery and mundanity all the more precious.

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And what a party. While the sparkling dialogue, which wends acrobatically between its cast’s dual accents and dialects, slides deliciously from the pens of McQueen and playwright Courttia Newland, Lovers Rock becomes something truly special whenever all sense of plot and character falls away entirely. For bold extended stretches of anything up to 10 minutes (not insignificant real estate in a 68-minute work), McQueen loses himself on the sweat-drenched dance floor, putting the lens in the middle of the bodies and souls losing themselves to the bass-heavy, sensual blend of reggae and soul which gives the film its title. One sequence, easily in contention for most arresting scene of the year, sees that music fade to nothing as the crowded room sings the chorus of Janet Kay’s forgotten 1979 hit “Silly Games” a cappella ad infinitum, collectively struggling to hit its top notes. Close ups of fingers on forearms, hips against hips and mouths hovering inches from one another are some of the most palpably, irrefutably sexy images put to screen in recent memory, but they also form part of the scene’s broader collage of pure, communal euphoria — absolute rapture in a Kensington sitting room.

McQueen allows Lovers Rock to ride across the undulating moods that any party-lover would be familiar with, all the while checking in with his core cast at regular intervals. As the party cools off and the morning creeps in, the spectres of real life start to manifest more solidly. Franklyn sneaks Martha back to the garage where he works for an early-hours tryst, possibly a nod to a key setting in Isaac Julien’s Young Soul Rebels, a 1991 watershed moment in young Black British cinema. But when Franklyn’s boss arrives and Franklyn quickly code-switches into a more unambiguously English accent, the cocoon-like paradise of the night is clearly peeling away, though Martha cherishes those sweet memories as she slips back into her bedroom. A smile flickers on Martha’s face as her mother calls her from downstairs to go to church. Parties are disposable, ephemeral experiences, gone in a flurry of movement, flesh and drink, but McQueen’s triumphant feature shows that, in those moments of pure release and connection, and in the warmth they leave viewers with, they are absolutely vital for survival.

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