A Night Like This review: Refreshing queer film will fill and break your heart at same time

As LGBTQ+ cinema accelerates, so too does the social media-led desire for it be pervasively bawdier. A salacious sex scene? Congrats, that’s one point! Toe-sucking? Ten points! And so on.

It’s oddly refreshing then that A Night Like This, the debut feature from director Liam Calvert, bins off the incessant demand for more-is-more physical contact in favour of tender touches and opaque, compelling emotions.

In From The Side star Alexander Lincoln is Oliver, a wannabe musician, formerly rich club owner, and impish, sexually ambiguous Jack the Lad. In London at Christmas time, he brashly cons Lukas (Jack Brett Anderson), a gay German man, out of a pint at a pub.

It’s OK though, Lukas has bigger things to worry about: moments before, the struggling actor was hanging over a bridge, consumed by the trauma of an earlier incident, contemplating the end.

Oliver, disguising his familial trauma and sense of failure by being overly gregarious, convinces Lukas to come for a second pint. From there, this unlikely duo resolve to spend the next 12 hours of nighttime together, trawling London’s cobbled streets and dingy dive bars, slowly unfurling themselves for each other.

Where A Night Like This succeeds most is in its vivid picture of London as a Jekyll and Hyde city. Beneath its warm lights, there is postcard beauty and endless opportunity for connection, yet in its shadows exists deep, consuming loneliness. Calvert captures this less in cinematography and more in the film’s narrative: these are two men lost in the city’s fray and barely staying afloat, offering each other an unexpected life buoy.

It’s a classic “chalk and cheese” pairing, with Anderson offering puppy-dog vulnerability and Lincoln’s mercurial wild child keeping up the pace. The bittersweetness of their relationship can both fill and shatter your heart in as many minutes, sometimes within the same scene. 

Sadly there is some clunky, cloying dialogue that takes away from the genuinely moving connection between the two leads, while additional characters – a drunken xenophobe, a homeless petty criminal – push the narrative forward, but feel irritatingly inauthentic. 

Still, A Night Like This is an admirable addition to the gamut of queer relationships on screen, and is a balm for anyone who came to a big city to find themselves, only to get more lost. Where another filmmaker might opt for a bow-tied ending, Calvert leaves Oliver and Lukas’ relationship in murky water, in a city rife with contradictions, and it’s all the better for it. 

A Night Like This is in UK cinemas from 26 September.

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