Director: Athina Rachel Tsangari
Writers: Athina Rachel Tsangari, Joslyn Barnes
Stars: Caleb Landry Jones, Harry Melling, Rosy McEwen
Synopsis: Over seven hallucinatory days, a village with no name, in an undefined time and place, disappears.
Given how keen most filmmakers seem to be to turn medieval lands into settings for horrifying folk tales involving demonic billy goats and/or cult-operated forests, Athena Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest looks, on paper, to be a welcome and necessary respite from familiarity. Described as a “tragicomic take on a Western,” the Greek auteur’s third feature, which premiered at this year’s Venice International Film Festival and has since screened at Toronto and New York, respectively, is a hallucinatory snapshot of a small village that is slowly disappearing before its inhabitants’ eyes, despite their inability to understand why. It oozes with ambiguity, but not the kind that is meant to send chills up spines, a la Robert Eggers’ The Witch or Goran Stolevski’s You Won’t Be Alone. Instead, it’s a work of enigmatic visual storytelling that feels as though it’s constantly alluding to the existence of something disturbing, one that you expect to eventually reveal itself, until it evades doing so at the last possible moment.
Yet while Tsangari and co-writer Joslyn Barnes’ adaptation of Jim Crace’s 2013 novel of the same name certainly maintains these characteristics throughout its runtime, it does so at a pace that feels overlong for the sake of it, dragging down the proceedings as it attempts to expand its shrinking world. Which is a crying shame, given that its cast and crew feature some of independent cinema’s most coveted and prolific current artists. Harvest boasts a stellar under-the-radar batch of actors who tend to give it their all no matter the size of the picture, like Caleb Landry Jones, Harry Melling, Rosy McEwan, and Arinzé Kene, to name a few. Its editors, Matthew Johnson and Nico Leunen, are well-respected talents; Johnson worked on Tsangari’s previous features, Attenberg and Chevalier, while Leunen cut films like Beautiful Boy, Skate Kitchen, and the underrated 2023 gem The Eight Mountains. Nicholas Becker, who co-composed the film’s score with Landry Jones and Ian Hassett, won an Academy Award for his sound work on Sound of Metal in addition to composing its score. And the best facet of this ever-creamy crop is Sean Price Williams, the texture-heavy cinematographer behind Good Time, Her Smell, and this year’s Between the Temples.
Perhaps it goes without saying, but it is possible to have a film that is brilliant in its technical makeup while neglecting the rest of what must come together for a movie to work on the whole. Unfolding entirely on the grounds of a remote English village sometime during the Middle Ages – though no specific time frame is mentioned, the townsfolk’s focus on land cultivation and the film’s costumes, wool tunics and jackets designed by Kirsty Halladay, suggest that this is the case – the story is told from the perspective of Walter Thirsk (Landry Jones). It’s a curious-if-faithful choice, given that Thirsk is reticent to divulge his observations and feelings, even if they’re rooted in truth, due to a nasty case of imposter syndrome as he wasn’t born in the village, a fate that typically spells exile. He’s only considered a part of the community because of his relationship with Kitty (McEwan) and his loyalty to the village’s leader, Master Kent (Melling), for whom he’s long-worked.
Harvest’s onset (and title) suggests that the settlement is about to boom with crops and thrive for the remainder of the active picking season, but a barn fire that occurs early on in the film threatens the citizen’s ability to gather. In an attempt to extinguish the blaze, Thirsk not only injures his hand severely – makeup head Anita Brolly’s handiwork makes Landry Jones’ hand look far blacker than Dumbledore’s after suffering from the curse on Marvolo Gaunt’s ring in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince; shout-out to those who get the reference – but he deduces who caused the fire, a revelation he hesitates to reveal. Later, three outsiders descend upon the village only to be caught and imprisoned by Master Kent and his henchmen, if you will. Again, Thirsk remains at a remove, though he’s more inclined to have compassion for them than to spit on the stoop of their pillory.
These intruders are far more than mere travelers who stumbled upon an unknown dwelling. That two of them are white men and the other is a Black woman (Thalissa Teixeira, a standout) complicates matters, not solely because there is only one other Black person in the town, a cartographer called Phillip “Mr. Quill” Earle (Kene, further fortifying an already-strong impression on screen) who was welcomed in by Master Kent, who wants him to draw a map of the village and its surrounding areas. Unsurprisingly, his task comes undone as the same happens to the town, and he begins to lose himself as everything around him falls away as well. Earle contemplates the role his race has in how he is being treated in the village just as every other settler reflects on their own treatment of others. Could their array of collective misdeeds be what’s causing their misfortune? Better yet, does it even matter?
The problem with the above fates and descriptions, along with the many, many other ideas that Tsangari and Barnes’ script explores despite not warranting consideration in the grand scheme of things, is that they could be applied to any of Harvest’s characters, principal or otherwise. So much of its overlong runtime is dedicated to ambiguity for ambiguity’s sake, as if to ramp up the dreamlike stakes to a point where they became nightmarish at their core – and not in the sense that the film scares you, unless the perpetual presence of urine is a disturbing concept.
If nothing else – and there’s really nothing else – Harvest is bound to leave you mesmerized from a visual standpoint, yet entirely unmoved in the midst of that spellbound state. Price Williams’ consistently-brilliant cinematography has never done as much heavy lifting as it does here, as he provides a visual feast in spite of the film’s unrelenting darkness. But there’s such a heavy reliance on metaphor and imagery that it never really amounts to much of a narrative meal as it undoubtedly could have been. While we’re talking about visuals, roughly halfway through the picture, Price Williams turns his lens on a slug encased in mud for 15 seconds or so before cutting away. It’s a beautiful shot, but one that feels like a fitting metaphor for the film in and of itself: Harvest is moving as fast as it can, but like a mollusk slinking through the mire, it’s never going to end up anywhere at all.