From Athina Rachel Tsangari (Chevalier, Attenberg), Harvest is a spellbinding and thrillingly distinctive period piece like no other, telling a folk horror-inflected story about the trauma of modernity and the looming threat of the outsider. Set over seven hallucinatory days in an idyllic rural Scottish village, the traditional way of life for its agrarian community is suddenly disrupted when a series of unexpected invaders from the outside world bring about irrevocable - and potentially damaging - change. Combining an ensemble cast lead by Caleb Landry Jones with beautifully textured storytelling, this is an eerie, atmospheric and deeply immersive cinematic experience that asks what happens when people decide what a society should be.
Please note, per the request of the director, all dialogue in Harvest is subtitled.
The Garden Cinema View:
Rachel Athina Tsangari creates an immersive world with a folk-horror adjacent tale of communal living, superstition, and the threat of encroaching modernity. As with Jim Crace's source novel, the location and time period are deliberately vague (although we're somewhere in Scotland here), allowing for a kind of permeating allegorical thrust, albeit without a particularly defined point. Wandering into this wonderfully realised environment is Caleb Landry Jones' peculiar and insular Walt Firsk. It's a piece of casting that is both striking and distracting, imbuing Crace's rather empty protagonist with an uneasy energy, slightly at odds with the character's role in the village. Sean Price Williams provides delightfully tactile 16mm cinematography, and supporting performances from Harry Melling (Pillion) and Rosy McEwen (Blue Jean) are strong. The pacing and narrative do meander and plod along, but there is still much to admire in such an ambitious adaptation.
