Harvest
Athina Rachel Tsangari, sometime Yorgos Lanthimos collaborator and leading light of the Greek Weird Wave, returns to features following a nine-year hiatus. Harvest, her first English-language film, is a trippy medieval parable drawn from Jim Crace’s novel of the same name.
Although imbued with the same off‑kilter humour that powered Attenberg and Chevalier to international success, here Tsangari pursues an angular, folkloric register, situating her story in an unnamed Scottish border hamlet confronted by enclosure, cartographic bureaucracy and outsiders blamed for an unexplained blaze.
Walter Thirsk, portrayed by Caleb Landry Jones with fraught fragility, occupies the nebulous space between peasantry and gentry; childhood ties bind him to benevolent yet ineffectual landlord Master Kent (Harry Melling). Their complicated kinship – both recent widowers – grants the picture its most persuasive emotional anchor. Around them swirl suspicious villagers, mysterious wanderers and the comparatively worldly map‑maker Earle (Arinzé Kene), whose parchment lines foreshadow dispossession. The arrival of Kent’s ambitious cousin Jordan (Frank Dillane) hastens the transformation of fields into profitable pasture, pushing the settlement toward further fracture.
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Cinematographer Sean Price Williams lenses mud, mist and ember skies with handsome texture – 16mm grain and flares showing – producing tableaux that recall Bruegel as much as Gaspar Noé. Tsangari’s taste for ritual detail – a buttercup dabbed across a child’s cheek before the Gleaning Queen selection, the burning of a corn dolly – creates searing imagery.
Unhappily, the film’s allegorical ambitions overpower its drama. Often-hapless characters frequently stand for positions rather than pulse with personality or motive, slowing momentum across an already‑stretched running time. When violence finally erupts – a humiliating shaving, a ghastly pillory interlude – the shock registers, but the preceding drift lessens the impact. Landry Jones and several co-stars, capable of real and feral unpredictability, are restrained by dialogue that sounds stock.
There’s plenty to admire – the earthy sound design, inventive point‑of‑view shifts, flashes of sly humour – while simultaneously yearning for the vivacity that enlivened the director’s earlier work. Like the village it depicts, the film is meticulously crafted yet oddly two-dimensional: a map, not a place.
