Featured Review
London Film Festival 2024 – Harvest ★★★
Released: TBC (London Film Festival)
Director: Athina Rachel Tsangari
Starring: Caleb Landy Jones, Harry Melling
Reviewed By: Leoni Horton
Cult arthouse filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari returns with her newest film, Harvest. Based on Jim Crase’s novel of the same name, Harvest is a transgressive folk tale set in the Middle Ages that boldly confirms Tsangari’s style and directorial vision. The film is a strange and unearthly endeavour with dirt caked thickly under its fingernails.
The film follows a secluded, self-sufficient Scottish agricultural village in a state of grief as it descends into paranoia when strangers begin to penetrate their close ranks and upset their delicate equilibrium. We begin with a mysterious inferno, which burns the village barn casting suspicion and distrust among the villagers as to who the perpetrators could be. Three strangers are subsequently captured: two men are confined to the stockades for the week, and one woman has her head brutally shaved before being cast out into the wilderness. Although the problem is solved, the villagers are further exacerbated when a mysterious map-maker and three gentlemen arrive making claims on the farming land, threatening to uproot their existence and Edenesque communal existence.
Caleb Landy Jones plays Walter Thisk, a reserved manservant whose narration suggests a certain unexpected intelligence, curiosity for nature and the world beyond the village borders. We see him fully immersed in nature: swimming naked in the lake, fingering insects, taking a chomp out of a piece of bark. He sparks up a friendship with a map-maker and confides that he has never seen the sea or breached the village borders (upon which the village elders bash their children’s heads to remind them of their place). Walter is also the closest friend of the village’s leader Master Kent (Harry Melling), having grown up together as children. The two men are also untied in loss, having both lost their wives to illness and childbirth complications. Yet, despite his significant place in the town’s hierarchy, Walter is an outsider, often ostracised from the trust and bonds shared within his village.
When Master Kent’s wealthy cousin Master Jordan shows up to modernise and monopolise the village, Walter bears witness as the threat of capitalism triggers a supernatural paranoia among the villagers. The strangers are accused of witchcraft and rumours of a curse spark panic, violence and the eventual unravelling of the very fabric holding the village together.
Harvest is filthy. Tsangari makes her way into this nameless place by accentuating the muck, plunging us ankle-deep into the mud-drenched earth. Caleb Landry Jones looks birthed from the land, his clothes and face smeared with dried filth and crud. It’s almost as if we too can feel the dried soil in the grooves of our hands, and the weight of the wet sludge sinking us into despair. This hostile world-building creates an undeniable tangibility, exacerbated further by Sean Price Williams’s gritty cinematography. William’s presents Tsangari’s world in striking detail, emphasising every blade of grass, touch of skin and exuberant village tradition with astounding reverence.
The film’s overall tone is reminiscent of folk horror and Grimm fairy tales. It feels as if a hidden warning or cautionary biblical tale is hiding underneath Tsangari’s mountains of mud: the danger of monetizing and disrupting our delicate balance with nature is at the forefront of the collapse of Tsangari’s microcosmic Eden epic. Yet, the narrative is often plodding and meandering. Where there is often ample opportunity to reveal in the similar unnerving tension of Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, Tsangari often lingers too long on twisty conversations and aimless wandering.
Although rough and often difficult to get along with, Tsangari doesn’t ever descend into melodrama. She has a rich sensibility as a filmmaker, and her prickly approach makes up for Harvest’s slow pace. Caleb Landy Jones can always be commended for his commitment, and Harry Melling proves himself once again as a dazzling character actor. Harvest will leave you unsettled and brimming with tension long after it packs up and leaves you alone.
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