Francis Lee, director of the acclaimed God’s Own Country, has made another same-sex love story, though set in the more remote, sorrowful reaches of muddy old England. Like his first film, Ammonite is a work of conviction, and Lee has raised his already high level of formal skill. But the movie misses the fervor and the sense of breakthrough that elevated Country above similarly morose beginnings.

A glowering, stone-faced Kate Winslet stars as the real-life paleontologist Mary Anning, who lives with her downcast mother (Gemma Jones) in the 1840s coastal village of Lyme Regis, selling curios from a shop adjoining her poky house. Lee’s color palette of gunmetal gray and ivory, with a splash of the aforementioned mud to liven things up, alludes to appetites dulled and joy denied. But Mary harbors a steadfast passion: searching for fossils on the beach no matter how strong the howling winds. Mary lives in seemingly friendless isolation, living to dig up, excavate, and clean prehistoric relics. 

So, it comes as a matter of some annoyance when a handsome, well-heeled gentleman (James McArdle) comes to town asking her to show him the paleontology techniques for which her finds have gained some London renown. Even worse, he wants to palm off his unhappy wife, Charlotte (Saoirse Ronan, downplaying her natural charm), on Mary when he goes away on a trip. Now Mary’s going to live with two depressed people instead of one.

Mary initially rejects Charlotte’s clumsy attempts to help out on expeditions and gives her a forbidding cold shoulder in the household. But slowly Charlotte becomes a reliable hunting companion. More suddenly, she becomes an ardent lover. The second development shocks the women, but not the viewer, who can see the attraction build between the two and foresee the collision of the opposites-attract pair.

Ammonite is rich in texture, and its severe visuals point to a strong vision, so it’s a mystery why the film can’t seem to get a handle on the romance at its core. The two women’s emotional connection isn’t clear, though they enjoy bouts of love-starved, bumptious sex that aims for contrast with the otherwise repressed atmosphere. Although Winslet’s Mary opens up in bed, she stays as flinty out of it as she ever was, showing little of the softening, bliss, or even confusion of unexpected infatuation. Ronan does the best she can to enliven an underwritten, reactive character whose personality is hard to define. That’s not the only aspect of the film to run a little thin; there’s a feminist message that Mary’s scientific finds are underappreciated by a male establishment, but it remains mostly buried, like a shell outlined under sand.

Underscored by gestures like sad music played on an out-of-tune piano, Ammonite’s atmosphere is almost unrelentingly heavy, and one’s mind may flit to secondary characters—Fiona Shaw brings a welcome twinkle in her eye as an old flame of Mary’s who might have been a little more fun than Mary could handle. One wants to warm to this movie, which has been made with craft and respect for characters who aren’t conventionally likeable and whose love has to remain hidden. We’re not exactly left cold as the film’s crashing seas and blustery gusts, but perhaps just cool.