At first glance, Greek Weird Wave alum Athina Rachel Tsangari's English language feature debut Harvest suggests we're in folk-horror territory. Like the recent The Severed Sun, it's set in an ambiguous time and place. It looks like rural England but the accents are Scottish. It seems vaguely like the Middle Ages except some characters wear spectacles, high five one another and use insults like "knobhead." A ritual that sees children forced to smack their heads against a rock to ward them off leaving the boundary of their hamlet suggests we might be in for a twist like that of M. Night Shyamalan's The Village.
But such a twist never arrives, and Tsangari's film is closer to the western genre than a horror. There's something of Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs Miller in its detailing of a mudsoaked community, though it's arguably closer to his infamous Popeye adaptation in its frustrating obtuseness.
The bare bones of a plot can be dug out of Harvest's narrative soil. The community is ruled by Charles (Harry Melling), a seemingly benevolent lord of this muddy manor. His best friend is Walter (Caleb Landry-Jones), who provides the film's narration in an almost impenetrable Scots-accented voiceover. The two men have been mates since childhood, and they've both lost their wives. While Charles continues to grieve, Walter has moved on to a relationship with Kitty (Rosy McEwen).
We spend more time with Walter than anyone else, but it would be difficult to think of him as a protagonist. He merely wanders in and out of scenes rather than directly impacting the plot. What little plot there is to speak of is centred on Quill (Arinzé Kene), a cartographer who has arrived in the village to draw up a beautifully illustrated map of the area. The villagers initially welcome Quill, but his work is at the behest of Edmund (Frank Dillane), a villainous fop who has inherited the land as cousin of Charles' late wife. Edmund's plan is to evict the tenants and turn the village into grazing land. To help achieve his goal he arrives with a black-and-tan-esque crew of rapey ne'er do wells who begin to cause havoc.
Tsangari and co-writer Joslyn Barnes seem more intent on creating a tapestry of life in a fictional village than in weaving any discernible narrative. In this they mildly succeed, though the anachronisms only serve to pull us out of any established verisimilitude. Sean Price Williams, know for his gritty cinematography on very modern New York set collaborations with Alex Ross Perry and The Safdie Brothers, proves an inspired choice to capture the images of pastoral life here with his customary 16mm camera, the grain of the film helping to sell this as a period piece, even if the exact period remains ambiguous. There are images of people working the land here that almost rival those in Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven.
But watching peasants reap and sow in beautifully framed tableaux isn't enough to sustain our interest for over two hours. At a certain point it becomes clear that Tsangari isn't going to offer us anything to latch onto in terms of a story, or even any characters we might give more than a single hoot about. If Harvest were half as detailed as Quill's map of its setting, we might not end up getting lost in its antagonising ambiguity.
Directed by: Athina Rachel Tsangari
Starring: Caleb Landry-Jones, Harry Melling, Rosy McEwan, Arinzé Kene, Thalissa Teixeira, Frank Dillane
