Drew Burnett Gregory is back at TIFF, reporting daily with queer movie reviews from one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. Follow along for her coverage of the best in LGBTQ+ cinema and beyond.

First queer love is all about projection. We’ve seen this in many a gay movie. A character, previously closeted to the world and even themself, meets someone, falls in love, and through this person emerges anew. Sometimes the love itself is easy to believe in. Desert Hearts for one. But often, the love was never the point. Call Me By Your Name, Pariah, classics like Lianna — it’s not about the romance, it’s about what the romance reveals.

On Swift Horses is an unconventional queer love story. The person Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones) first meets is not a lover, it’s not even a woman — it’s her soon-to-be brother-in-law Julius (Jacob Elordi). She’s drawn to him and doesn’t know why. She’s so drawn to him she finally agrees to marry his brother Lee (Will Poulter) just to remain in Julius’ life.

Shifting in time across the 1950s and in place from rural Kansas to San Diego, Las Vegas to Tijuana, this is a movie with many threads. Muriel’s journey shares equal weight with Julius’ own love story with a fellow gambler named Henry (Diego Calva). As Julius strives to finally find identity outside himself, Muriel strives for the opposite. They’re on parallel journeys but at very different points in a queer life.

This doesn’t mean Muriel’s queerness remains theoretical. She has meaningful encounters with a woman at the horse track (Kat Cunning) who invites her to a queer bar and with her neighbor Sandra (Sasha Calle) who has a vibrant queer community. True to the time, queerness may be in the shadows, but in the darkness it is plentiful.

And yet neither of these potential romances for Muriel are as telling as the moment when she pulls her hair back and tries to style it like Julius. It’s not projecting transness on the character to say her connection to Julius is not just based in their shared queerness but in her gender envy of his masculine queer aesthetic.

And oh what an aesthetic that is! Jacob Elordi has never looked better and never been better. The camera looks at him with a gaze that is both Henry’s lust and Muriel’s envy. Julius is given a tender heartthrob portrayal more akin to the images of the decade the film takes place than what we usually see on-screen in our current era.

It’s not an insult to the movie itself to say it will have a second life on the internet once the talented young gays online get their fan edit fingers on it. The film is as unruly as queer discovery but its many moments are sublime. Elordi will be the focus, but Daisy Edgar-Jones, Diego Calva, Sasha Calle, and Kat Cunning will receive plenty of deserved love as well.

There is a polish to the film for a story that could maybe have used a bit more grit. But the commitment to sincerity and melodrama works because of the performers. The world of the film feels more pastiche of the 1950s than an actual window, and it works for this romantic fantasy.

Throughout the film, parallels are made between gambling and living an out queer life. At one point a character states this parallel outright. This is a film determined to show that in this gamble the rewards far outweigh the risks.

On Swift Horses leans toward the wholesome and hopeful. But that doesn’t mean a lack of complexity. This is a very queer film about very queer experiences. While the plotting is neat, the emotions remain wild.

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