Lilies Not for Me

Will Seefried's 2025 film is set in England in the 1920s and concerns a clinic that treats homosexuality as an illness to be cured. Owen arrives there after a relationship in his past and is subjected to the methods of the period's medicine. The film does not use those methods for shock; its real interest is in how people are persuaded to see themselves as someone who needs to be repaired. Dorothy, a nurse at the clinic, is the only person quietly resisting the institution's logic, and her relationship with Owen is the film's most balanced section. The story moves back and forth in time, with the love affair in the past and the treatment in the present explaining each other. The tone is measured and the photography cold. Who it's for: viewers who follow period drama and queer history. Who it's not for: anyone who would rather not approach medical coercion and self-hatred; the film takes them as its subject.