Hopes were high at Venice for this film, the English-language debut for the formidably talented Greek New Wave director Athina Rachel Tsangari, based on the novel by Jim Crace. Sadly, it’s a tiresome folk non-horror set in a quaintly imagined medieval village on the Scots-Mummerset border with plenty of golden-hour landscape shots and dreamy insect closeups: a pastiche bucolic non-place with rural-effect activities.
These are smudgy-faced folk preparing for the titular harvest sporting various funny hats and Dionysiac masks and the children are forced at a certain age to ritually hit their heads against a local rock to learn not to get above themselves and learn never to leave the district – an entirely preposterous tradition (though evidently based on fact) which takes us very close to Lars von Trier territory.
And sadly it is all topped off with an unbearably torpid and supercilious performance from Caleb Landry Jones with an accent that makes him sound as if he comes from the same part of Sherwood Forest as Russell Crowe’s Robin Hood.
He is Walter Thirsk, a villager of few words and with a troubled background, but now taken up with a local woman (Rosy McEwen). He is also very close to the lord of the manor, the kindly and diffident Master Kent (Harry Melling) who is not especially concerned for retributive justice when some unspecified person actually burns the barn down. But the villagers themselves need scapegoats, so they grab three outsiders – a woman whose head is shaved and is allowed to leave, and two guys with broad Scottish accents from a different century who are put in the stocks.
But while these luckless outsiders are all but forgotten about, it is clear that Master Kent has plans for his property that his serfs know nothing about. He has employed a map-maker, Earle (Arinzé Kene) to draw up a chart of the locality, to assist his scheme to convert everything to pasturage and lucrative sheep farming which will put most of the population out of work – and all this at the behest of the land’s true owner, his unscrupulous cousin Jordan (Frank Dillane) who is all set to assert his legal rights. Walter senses that the making of this exotic map betokens no good for anyone, a schematising of ownership which he says is a “flattening” of the land.
It is perhaps the calamitous barn burning which has incidentally accelerated these plans although this fire does not seem to affect the inhabitants’ lives all that much.
The ploddingly unvaried pace and undirected, underpowered performances make this an exasperating experience: a directionless, shallow movie which seems bafflingly unconvincing and inauthentic at every turn. Even when the story builds to a melodramatic confrontation, a hideous display of patriarchy, cruelty and sexual violence, everyone seems bored and half asleep and Tsangari can’t make this peculiar confection come to life.
