Harvest (18) |Close-Up Film Review

Writer director Athina Rachel Tsangari Name’s tale of a simple, poverty stricken country village in Scotland in what appears to be the 17th/18th century, which is destroyed in the name of progress, could have had relevance to the modern world.  

The director dedicates the film to her grandmother whose home was destroyed to make way for a new road.  The film however is so long winded it sort of loses its way, as it were.

The central character is nature loving Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones) who is good friends with the laird on whose land the village stands.  Said laird Master Kent (Harry Melling) is the widower of the woman who owned it and as Kent isn’t that posh. one does wonder if she married beneath her, as it were.   The film is being released with English subtitles, helpful for the hard of hearing but also presumably because its Greek director fears we won’t understand the strong and sometimes variable accents.  But even so, such details aren’t always clear. 

The villagers themselves are a rough and unfriendly bunch with some very strange customs.    When strangers turn up, they accuse them of setting fire to a barn the previous night, even though it’s pretty clear that it was the two village idiots who actually did it.  The villagers however put the two men in the stocks for days – a cruel punishment which we witness in all its unpleasant detail  – and shear off the luxuriant locks of the women who was with them, who then escapes.

There is another stranger in the village, a map maker Earle (Arinzé Kene), who is making a cartographical record of the area and is befriended by Will. 

 After about an hour of giving us detail of the simple , witless and rather nasty village life, the  director finally gets down to the plot, when Master Jordan (Frank Dillane), who is a cousin of Kent’s dead wife, arrives and as her nearest relative, claims the manor and the land for himself – it would appear spousal inheritance rights don’t apply in this time and place.   Jordan wants to destroy the traditional way of life there, bring in modern (for the time) farming methods and get rid of a lot of the workers.

And to cut a very long drawn out story short and a few ends left loose – as in who cut the throat of the dead widow’s favourite horse? – the villagers finally give in and leave , their lives totally destroyed by progress and greed.   I think we call it capitalism now.

To be fair to the film, it creates a convincing albeit dreary picture of the period and the villagers’ lifestyle and the camerawork is very lively.   At around 100 minutes it might just have worked reasonably well.  At over two hours it becomes a bore.