Do places and living things (be there plant or animal) derive their power and importance from their naming, or simply by being. Who has stewardship and what does ownership mean to a place and its people. We live in a time when private property has come to have more rights than a human being, but such arguments began long ago, and connection to the land and the violence than can ensue mean some fight tooth, nail, and body, while others might yell and then retreat.
Part of the aptly names Greek Weird Wave, Athina Rachel Tsangari (Attenberg, Chevalier) dives into folk-horror-western genre territory in Harvest. Based on the novel by Jim Crace, with a script co-written by Tsangari and Joslyn Barnes, it's a tale which hinges on a kind of eerie uncanny of the rough-hewn world about to change and how those both with the power and without can create their own destruction.
In perhaps the 19th century—maybe 18th? (The time period is not given, part of the dark charm of the film), on a remote Scottish farm, with one landowner, the resident workers who till the soil in exchange for home, board, and their small community, find their world turned upside down in a few short days. First, a fire is mysteriously set in one of the village buildings. Next, a man called Mr. Earle (Arinzé Kene) has come to paint some maps of the land, apparently at the behest of Master Kent (Henry Melling). Then, the villagers find and quickly abuse three strangers on the land: the two men are put into stocks for a week, while the woman whom they dub Mistress Bedlam (Thalissa Teixiera) is shorn of her hair before she runs into the nearby woods. It seems whatever peace and security brought to the village by their distance from civilization is about to come to an end.
Walt Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones), through whom we view most of the story, is not from this land, but came to it via Kent, his childhood friend; instead of staying on as manservant, he chose to become one of the villagers through his wife, who has since passed. But like strangers who eventually become friends, it is he who becomes the village's guide and its most staunch defender. We meet him as he indulges in connecting with earth, the loch, the insects, as if he felt more animal than human. Perhaps that suits him better, though we eventually learn this seems to be how he processes the grief of his wife's passing.
Unable to tend the fields for a time due to an injury from the fire, it's Walt's task to show Earle around the village and its land, and he shows the duality of his life: his education from childhood and early years still somewhat set him apart, yet he clearly has embraced the pastoral life. His sometime affair with another widowed villager, Kitty (Rosy McEwen) brings some solace, but Walt clearly has only a connection to this land that has held him and his lost love in, perhaps poverty, but some moments of contentment.
In these villagers' world, there is routine and ritual. Little separates them from the land that is their home and their sustenance: the pigs and sheeps are underfoot, the hay is both what becomes their food and what they wind into their hair, their clothing is that which they fashion themselves and is by no means without its beauty even if it is not considered 'fine'. But their isolation makes them xenophobic (two of the outsiders being Black people whom they have never seen before, it's something both exotic and of the devil to them). There is the occasional mention of God, but here, it seems the Pagan rituals and iconography are still dominant.
Print film always provides a tactile quality to a story, and Sean Price Williams' (Good Time, The Sweet East) gorgeous cinematography lets us feel the sheafs of wheat, the wildflowers, the bread, the fabric of rough clothing, everything that passes through the hands of these villagers, who might be poor in material wealth, but still sustain themselves. And this is a rough world they live in. Hence, why they can be rough, immediately attacking strangers on their lands, with what little power they have. They are not exempt from cruelty by virtue of their poverty.
They are in ways as imperfect as those to whom they owe their labour. When Master Kent finds his power usurped by the true heir to the land, Master Jordan, who comes in in his city finery and plans to kick the villagers off their land in favour of sheep farming, those same villagers don't do all that much to try and save themselves. Oh they talk a good fight, and do some violence to one of Jordan's flunkies, but when a village child is essentially kidnapped, the villagers run away.
Landry Jones gives one of his finest performances to date, of a man somewhat floating through a life of grief, one which is not regretted in its choices, but mourned in the missing piece that should be beside him. Caught between the villagers he joined and the world he was once a part of, he wants to belong to the former but is forced to speak with the latter. Everyone except him, it seems, will follow where they are pushed, even if they should fight back.
Harvest provides a pseudo-historical record; perhaps not in exact facts, but in trying to understand how the past still contains seeds of the present. In what oddities we might find with those that came before we can see what we might have lost, and what we might return to, for better or worse.
Harvest opens in select theatres in the USA on Friday, August 1st, including the Metrograph in New York, and will begin streaming on Mubi on August 8th.