Brian Welsh is strongest when he lets young people enjoy freedoms that also frighten us. We rate his attention to friendship and class, and his ability to move from comedy into danger without making the change feel forced.
Fi1m perspective
Byron’s queer friendships in What It Feels Like for a Girl (2025) have a comic energy that makes their appeal immediately clear. Brian Welsh gives that pleasure room without making us forget what might go wrong. We were worried for Byron because Welsh makes sex, drugs and exploration feel enticing even as he shows their risks. The disturbing material belongs to the same story as the jokes, rather than arriving as a corrective to them. That is a difficult balance, and his direction largely gets it right.
Welsh wrote and directed In Our Name (2010), about a female soldier returning from Iraq, before gaining wider attention with The Entire History of You (2011), the Black Mirror episode written by Jesse Armstrong. With Beats (2019), which he wrote and directed, he adapted a stage play about Scottish rave culture in the 1990s. Its energetic rave sequences keep the characters central, an approach that connects it to his later television work. The recurring interest is in what young people find in these places, and why they want to stay.
In What It Feels Like for a Girl, adapted from Paris Lees’s memoir, the clubs belong to the early 2000s. Welsh ties the energy of those sequences to the characters’ feelings, so the story does not have to stop whenever the dancing starts. Ellis Howard gives the programme a central performance worth following through its most uncomfortable passages. The attention to class matters too: Byron’s coming of age stays specific to his circumstances rather than becoming a lesson that could be delivered by anyone.
The writing is less reliable when it reaches for easy reassurance, and Welsh’s control of tone cannot quite conceal that. There are moments when we would rather it left us with the discomfort it has worked hard to create. We value the friendships most when their humour and pleasure need no further justification, and the programme is often confident enough to leave them alone. Start with What It Feels Like for a Girl, but do not expect its warmth to make it an easy evening.
Biography
Brian Welsh is a Scottish film and television director and screenwriter. He was born in Falkirk in 1981.
Welsh studied at the Cleveland College of Art and Design and the National Film and Television School. He began his career as an editor on documentaries before making his directing debut with the short film Kin (2009). His first feature, In Our Name (2010), was followed by the Black Mirror episode 'The Entire History of You' (2011). He directed the BBC dramas Mayday (2013) and The Escape Artist (2013), and wrote and directed the feature Beats (2019).
Welsh directed episodes of the 2025 series What It Feels Like for a Girl. His television work includes Glasgow Girls (2014), for which he won a BAFTA Scotland award.
