Harvest (2024): A Nightmarish Look at the Past, or a Prescient Look at the Future? 

Based on a novel by Jim Crace, Harvest marks the English-language debut of Athina Rachel Tsangari. It was released to UK cinemas in July of this year and is currently available to stream on Mubi. The film is a curious, absorbing tale, set over seven hallucinatory days, in a village with no name, in an undefined time and place. Townsman-turned-farmer Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones) is our protagonist, the childhood friend of diffident lord of the manor Charles Kent (Harry Melling). Together, they face an invasion from the outside world, as modernity in the shape of capitalist exploitation comes to threaten their very way of life. Disturbed and unsettled by the events, the villagers seek to scapegoat some seemingly hapless outsiders for their woes with fatal consequences.  

Harvest is a must watch for admirers of folk; a beautiful looking and intriguing film, sometimes sensory and tactile, at other times dreamlike and disorientating. Much of the disorientation can be explained by the ambiguous period in which the action takes place. The close-knit and tightly bound residents of the unnamed Scottish rural idyll could be living a few hundred years in the past – in which case, what we’re seeing is a nightmarish and surreal take on the Highland clearances; when aristocratic landowners, seeking greater profits from wool production, replaced traditional tenant farming with large-scale sheep grazing and therefore evicted families who had diligently worked their ancestral lands – or they could be living in the future, as evinced by anachronistic, post 18th century touches. If that possibility is the case, then it’s a real shame that Tsangari has released her film in the same summer that Danny Boyle has released his own attention-grabbing Brexit allegory, 28 Years Later. 

Whilst the storyline here emphatically echoes the clearances, there’s definitely some contemporary, post-Brexit relevance to be mined here too. The villagers have an isolationist stance and are suspicious-bordering-on-the-contemptuous of outsiders such as Arinzé Kene’s cartographer and Thalissa Teixeira’s enigmatic interloper. As such, this is a narrative thread that draws parallels with the hot potato topic of immigration, especially when the film descends into a literal witch hunt in the latter half. Indeed, the ineffectual nature of the village leadership, as represented by Harry Melling’s Master Kent and his wishy-washy promises of economic security, could serve as a metaphor for the Cameron and May governments that navigated us into these troubled, impoverished waters beyond the EU. Whilst his ruthless, authoritarian usurper and cousin Jordan, played by Frank Dillane, could point towards the growing rise of the far right, playing on the fears of others whilst ushering in an economic boom that will only benefit himself. 

Race is very interesting here. As the film is about a traditionally white, rural and isolated community, it is inevitable that the paranoia and ill-feeling the characters exhibit is directed towards the non-white outsiders arriving in their community. This is evinced by both the cartographer and a trio of trespassers accused of burning Master Kent’s barn and eating his foul, two of whom (Teixeira and Noor Dillan-Knight) are people of colour. In one powerful scene, Teixeira is publicly punished by the villagers for her “crimes”  by having her hair shorn. The scenes not only bring to mind the punishments faced by French women accused of fraternising with Nazis in WWII, they also have a profound cultural resonance given that she is Black and her hair, a symbol of identity, heritage, and self-expression, is forcibly removed by a white community; specifically the Aryan-looking Rosy McEwan, whose character Kitty is the one to wield the scissors, whilst the menfolk take locks as trophies. Yet, what separates these outsider characters is their positions of power; the latter, known only as “Beldams” are displaced “scavengers” shown to have none,  whilst the map maker is clearly defined as educated, of some authority and with a power that is eventually released to shape the villagers lives irrevocably. As an African, he is also an inversion of colonial Britain sent to “discover” and map out the African continent, to the equal detriment of that population. Likewise, the film’s antagonist, Jordan, is portrayed by the mixed-race Dillane. 

It’s not a perfect film. The dialogue is sometimes ponderous and the accent work, specifically that of Caleb Landry Jones in the lead role of Walt, leaves a lot to be desired – all are common flaws from a director for whom English is not their first language. But sometimes, and more damningly, character motivations seem unclear, whilst scenes and narrative are just poorly handled; a character is introduced in one scene before being violently set upon by the villagers in the next. As a lead into the final act, it would have more weight if we’d actually seen this character earlier and more, as it is he’s just called a “creep” on each occasion as he performs his antagonistic duties and then is attacked – by none other than film critic Antonia Quirke, no less! The scene that immediately follows this is laughable too; a series of rapid cuts to villagers voicing their fears and reaching the mutual decision to flee in the flat line readings of your average primary school nativity performance. 

And yet, I liked Harvest. It’s an immersive feature in which its two hour plus runtime never feels like a slog. It’s also beautifully shot by Safdies’ regular Sean Price Williams and serves a good, intriguing folk aesthetic that is rich with the titular harvest practices, ritual masks, Gaelic sing-songs, lush, golden hour imagery, and a diegetic ASMR soundtrack. It’s likely to be clumped into the genre of folk horror but, barring the odd cry of witchcraft and an unnerving scene in which children line up to willingly headbutt a boundary stone to know their place within the village (a scene that put me in mind of the hand-chopping sequence in Penda’s Fen), there’s no actual horror here; it’s more like a folk historical, or an anti-capitalist folk allegory. 

MARK’S ARCHIVE – HARVEST (2024)

CLICK ON THE POSTER ABOVE TO WATCH HARVEST ON MUBI