Twelve year old Bud (Leigh McCormack in his sole film feature) lives in 1950s Liverpool amongst a loving family, an idyllic childhood interrupted by chapters of suffering. The young boy is particularly close to his sister Helen (Ayse Owens) and delights in spending time with her group of girlfriends chatting and laughing, in a warm respite from the outside world where he's bullied by his peers and terrified by the austere culture of Catholicism. Bud seeks solace whiling away hours at the local picture house and observing the neighbourhood through his window, gradually coming to realise that the feelings awakened in him by some of the local men are not permitted by the Church. In The Long Day Closes Terence Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives) creates an elegy to the fragility of memory— a film about longing, for other experiences, to grow up and to be loved.

There are a lot of coming-of-age/love-letter-to-cinema stories out there, but The Long Day Closes is a film of uncommon delicacy and dreamlike beauty. Davies draws on his own memories of childhood but consciously resists the urge to delve too deeply into nostalgia, capturing a sense of sadness and what might have been. A sublime soundtrack of songs from the era re-contextualised into rapturous moments that approach secular prayer, alongside a sepia haze of images like faded photographs, make this truly transportive cinema.