Once Upon a Time in the Midlands: Weekend at 15

The first image presented in Andrew Haigh’s 2011 romantic drama Weekend is a view over Nottingham. The buildings don’t stand as tall as London’s and clusters of brick houses are swaddled by treelined parks. It’s not an instantly identifiable location for audiences outside of Nottingham, nor is it a quintessential image in British cinema, let alone queer film. This represents a rarely acknowledged problem; Haigh’s precious film, which turns 15 in 2026, remains one of a small collection of films that explore the contemporary gay experience away from the capital. There is a consistent tendency to rely on London as the foundation for queer British stories, depriving audiences of seeing beyond a very specific part of the country. When filmmakers do venture outside of London, it turns out there are plenty of stories to tell that all benefit from a specific sense of place.

Haigh’s British mumblecore follows introverted English Midlands lifeguard Russell (Tom Cullen) and flirtatious art student Glen (Chris New) over 48 hours as the erotic excitement of a one-night stand blurs into an emotional connection that transcends their short-lived time together. They meet when Russell stumbles into a gay bar after ditching a friend’s party; Glen is initially impervious to his advances, but the pair end the night tangled in the oceanic blue bedsheets in Russell’s tower-block flat 14 floors above the city.

Haigh is deliberate with Weekend​’s location as well as timeframe. This isn’t an abstract, nondescript setting; Nottingham’s cityscape sits proudly centre frame. Even the film’s cinematic release poster shows both men huddled at Russell’s tower-block window, gazing out at the city below. The writer-director’s naturalistic filmmaking style goes as far as to treat the historic city as a character alongside Russell and Glen. Whether walking through dual-carriageway underpasses, drunkenly stumbling down King’s Walk, or seen from the window of a high rise flat, Weekend is grounded in Nottingham’s identity and the way its central characters move through the space.

As more queer stories are able to break through at the cinema, certain questions arise time and time again (Should straight actors play gay roles? Are we tired of depressing gay storylines?), but it’s rare that the homogeny of setting in British queer cinema is recognised or challenged. Time and time again, queer stories set in the UK are rooted in London; it’s an obvious choice of course, with the capital serving as an emblem of opportunity and freedom. Take popular queer dramas like Matthew Warchus’s Pride and Russell T Davies’s series It’s a Sin; London offers these characters an escape from small town life where they’re finally able to live openly and connect with others. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with displaying the vibrancy of queer life in London, this being the prevalent cinematic narrative risks reducing queer life in the UK to a debate over rural versus urban; a traditional (often repressive) pastoral life versus a liberal city existence. 

So often in LGBTQ+ media, small-town life is presented as something you run from, only perpetuating this notion of homophobia attached to the rural. With this, queer characters are burdened with repression because they live in a location detached from the UK’s city; there’s the assumption that gay people are closeted and that a sense of queer community is desolate. But in Haigh’s film, gay bars are bustling; men are cruising; friends bash heads over ethics and politics, and the arts scene is thriving with unique exhibitions (Glen’s audio exhibition concept included). City life is not inhibited by not being London-centric. 

However, Weekend isn’t without the notion of big-city longing. Glen embodies the desire for the elusive sparkle of uprooting and leaving, arriving in a place far from your roots. Midway through Weekend, he confesses to Russell that he is moving to the United States the very next day to begin a two-year contemporary art course in Portland, Oregon (a city with a well-established reputation for its artistic and queer scenes). This ​‘other’ place represents a new start; a chance for self-reinvention and, to some degree, an escape from Glen’s life in Nottingham. There’s another version of Haigh’s film that sees Russell take off with his new lover, able to find himself in a big city and shed the anxiety he holds about his own sexuality. But this director isn’t interested in that kind of ending, one that implies living outside big-city lights means repressing one’s queerness. Nottingham may have half the population of Portland, but it’s Russell’s home. Haigh makes the conscious directorial decision to subvert this typical narrative device of the gay character fleeing.

Weekend addresses the topic head-on. When Glen declares ​“I can’t wait to get the fuck out of here to be honest,” Russell replies ​“You don’t mean that.” Glen admits ​“I do, maybe I don’t.” Because the film is set fully outside of London, it can explore the thematic conflict of searching for home and chosen family with a unique lens. While Glen longs for something more, Russell demonstrates that life can be fulfilling and full of belonging through his chosen family in an East Midlands city. Glen and Russell are a dichotomy; Glen will scream out of the window when confronted with homophobic abuse, while Russell is more interested in keeping his head down in quiet self-preservation. Similarly, after they’ve hooked up, they shake hands outside Russell’s flat as his neighbours – a heterosexual couple – kiss each other goodbye. These moments are less about painting Nottingham as some sort of homophobic environment and more a marker to illustrate Russell’s growth. The film ends with a bittersweet confession: instead of running through an airport to declare his love, Russell strolls up to Glen at one of Nottingham’s tram stations to open his arms and heart to the man on the platform.

There have been some notable queer works that ventured out of London; Queer as Folk was a breakthrough show with its unapologetic gay representation of Manchester’s gay village all the way back in 1999. More recently Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country followed suit, with Josh O’Connor and Alec Secareanu playing farmhands herding sheep and navigating a burgeoning romance in rural Yorkshire, alongside Georgia Oakley’s Blue Jean, a Newcastle-set drama that follows a lesbian schoolteacher (Rosy McEwen) amid the rollout of Section 28. Musical adaptation Everybody’s Talking About Jamie shines a light on Sheffield’s drag scene, Madfabulous takes viewers into the queer history of Anglesey while Ammonite heads south to capture lesbians fossil hunting in Dorset. Yet stories beyond the capital are still rare enough that they feel like occasional treats rather than part of a wider shift to diversify the sort of LGBTQ+ stories that get told at the cinema. 

The very last shot of Weekend is a perfect full-circle moment: Russell gazes out of his flat’s window at dusk, the city’s twinkling lights in the background as the neighbouring tower blocks and park below frame him as he unwraps the gift Glen has left for him. Russell has not left Nottingham; it is part of him, and he hasn’t had leave to awaken another part of himself, suggesting radical change can come in a person as much as a place. The fact that Weekend continues to resonate with audiences 15 years after it was released is testament to its beauty, but also a collective yearning for more LGBTQ+ narratives – ones that show the breadth of queer life across the United Kingdom, rather than ending with Zone 9 of the London Underground.