Departures (2025) Review

Directors Neil Ely & Lloyd Eyre-Morgan

Hello cinema lovers. Today's offering is an odd kind of film that asks you to watch a man while he makes every wrong decision he can. Peccadillo Pictures' latest feature, Departures, is also, however, very, very good and well worth your time.

Writer-Director-lead Lloyd Eyre-Morgan plays Benji, a gentle chap in a car crash of a situationship with Jake (David Tag), all white teeth, tanned muscles and charisma. The film opens at the end of the affair. A screaming row in a car park, Jake dumping Benji. Then the movie flashes back. Then it moves forward and flashes back again, and so on. This structure is an important plot point. Benji is not going through a breakup in order. He is doing what people actually do, reliving and regretting his actions. Over the next 80 minutes, the full picture of his time with Jake gradually reveals itself.

David Tag's Jake is the kind of man queer cinema has mostly shied away from making sympathetic. He is a closeted, self-hating, angry guy who strings Benji along on monthly trips to Amsterdam while keeping secrets from him. He is cruel, controlling, and violent. He is also written with enough honesty that you come to understand why someone falls for him. That's a hard task to pull off, but Tag's magnetism makes you believe in him.

The Amsterdam scenes are the film's core. Jake funds the trips, sets the rules: no holding hands, no photos, no labels. Benji agrees, because the alternative is nothing. The film draws a clean line between the version of the relationship Benji has in his head and what was actually happening. It presents this without judgment. It trusts you to see the difference.

This unbiased script shows several truths at once without picking a side. This puts Departures closer to Weekend (2011) and Gods Own Country (2017) than to most contemporary British queer cinema. Like Weekend, it shows the intimacy between two men who are not free to revel in it. Like God's Own Country, it shows the pain driving a character's awful behaviour.

The sex scenes are explicit and handled well. A BDSM scene with drug abuse shown in an Amsterdam hook-up is stark. They show a man trying to handle grief with poor decisions. The film earns these moments because they show what comes beforehand in Jake and Benji's time together. However, a straight club subplot involving Benji's coworker, Ryan, distracts slightly from the main plot. But this is a minor quibble.

Where Departures earns high praise is in the Jake backstory. A flashback to his awful childhood sees Jake come under the wing of his aunt Jackie (Kerry Howard), a sex worker and a bully who fills his head with homophobia, all the while pushing a bleak, dark straight lifestyle. An odd set of scenes, it plays like an early Shane Meadows film in tone: bleak, funny and mad. The scene where Jackie organises a birthday present for young Jake is a surprise, but watch out for the sucker punch.

It is also the kindest explanation of how Jake becomes the man we see Lloyd Eyre-Morgan is, however, the actor who holds the film together. Benji is an easy role to get wrong; he's seduced and bullied by Jake. But Eyre-Morgan shows an awareness in Benjis story that stops the film from falling apart. The final carpark scenes, in which the full extent of Jake's lies becomes clear, work because Benji just listens while his heart breaks. The eyes say everything.

The movie wraps up with a dreamy musical number between Jake and Benji. It's quite OTT but also sweet and touching. Whether it earns this moment depends on your taste for that kind of thing.

Departures is a raw, honest, authentic film made with feeling and empathy. It is not perfect. But it is honest about the way relationships affect people, and change them and that honesty is worth seeing. Another fine release from Peccadillo Pictures.

Departures will be available in UK cinemas from 17 April 2026.