Ammonite (2020)

Francis Lee's Ammonite arrives coated in sea spray, salt, and the particular grey of nineteenth-century Dorset. Kate Winslet plays Mary Anning, a real paleontologist who spent her mornings combing the Jurassic coast for ammonites and her afternoons being overlooked. Saoirse Ronan is Charlotte Murchison, deposited at Lyme Regis by a husband who cannot be bothered with her. The film is quiet, damp, and unhurried. It observes its characters washing stones, boiling pots, and staring at the sea with the patience of a tide chart.

The romance between the two women is the engine and the point. Their intimacy is depicted with a frankness the period genre usually reserves for corsets and longing glances, and the relationship carries the film's emotional weight entirely. The cast around them is uniformly white, as the historical setting dictates, and the two central queer roles are performed by straight-identified stars, with Fiona Shaw lending a supporting note of lived experience. No engagement with race, climate, body diversity, or neurodivergence troubles the proceedings. The film has other concerns.

Where it does push, it pushes on history. There is no evidence that Anning was a lesbian, and Lee has been forthright about the speculative nature of the choice, framing it as a correction to the routine straightening of queer lives. That is a deliberate act of revision, and the film wears it without apology. Elsewhere, the British Museum's display of her ichthyosaur with no attribution offers a glancing rebuke of institutional theft, and Charlotte's offer of a furnished London bedroom produces the film's one sharp speech about gilded cages. Mostly, though, Ammonite declines to lecture. It sits in the cold, watching two people find each other, and lets the glass case do the talking.