Harvest review: 'queasy, Scottish-set folk horror'

Having helped kicked off the Greek Weird Wave in aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Attenberg director Athina Rachel Tsangari returns with the Scottish-set Harvest, a kind of folk horror allegory set in an agrarian community on the brink of being ripped apart by the first stirrings of the industrial revolution. Adapted from Jim Crace’s Man Booker-nominated novel of the same name, Tsangari has transposed the book’s unspecified setting from the English countryside to Argyll, which makes the Highland Clearances the obvious analogy for what’s really going on in the background of the story.

Yet the film is a period movie only in the sense that a western is a period movie and the approach is more impressionistic and mythical than realistic. Mixing blood and mud with scenes of bucolic bliss and hallucinatory horror, it frees Tsangari of the need for historical accuracy when it comes to accents and ritualistic details (which are all over the place) and helps her capture the queasy vibe that emerges when a community doomed by the march of progress can’t get out of its own way.

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This simultaneously makes the film more intriguing and more frustrating, built as it is around an ineffectual character whose own passivity strands him at this impasse. Played by American actor Caleb Landry Jones, this is Walter Thirsk, an incomer who’s never lost his outsider status and has neither the full trust of the villagers, nor the full friendship of local landowner Master Charles Kent (Harry Melling), with whom he shares an uneasy childhood bond.

Still, Kent – who has his own family issues – trusts Walter enough to aid the cartographer (Arinzé Kene) he’s hired to map the surrounding landscape as part of his family’s plans to transform it. Needless to say, this further deepens the villagers’ collective – albeit justified – paranoia, though they also reap what they sow when their own cruel treatment of a trio of outsiders wrongly accused of setting a barn ablaze during the titular harvest celebrations coincides with a more existential threat to their way of life.

It’s pretty nihilistic stuff in the end and, for better and worse, Tsangari’s refusal to play up the genre elements and make her protagonist a more active part of the action makes its undeniable artistry harder to embrace.

In cinemas from 18 July

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