Harvest

This visionary period piece from Greek Weird Wave godmother Athina Rachel Tsangari (TIFF ’15’s Chevalier, TIFF ’10’s Attenberg) transports us to a remote English village where traditional ways of life are brutally disrupted by an Enclosure bill, transforming what was once common land into private property. Adapted by Tsangari and Joslyn Barnes from Jim Crace’s novel, Harvest is a haunting allegory about the contagion of xenophobia and the perils of unchecked capitalism.

Widower Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones) is something of an outsider in his tiny, superstitious community of farmers and shepherds. His isolation makes him accessible to visitors his fellow villagers shun, such as the cartographer Walter helps to survey the village boundaries.

When a fire consumes the village stables and a pair of drifters are scapegoated, a feeling of existential threat takes root. That’s exacerbated by the arrival of Edmund Jordan (Frank Dillane), wealthy cousin to mayor Master Kent (Harry Potter stalwart Harry Melling), who claims the village as his possession and castigates those who fail to forfeit what was theirs. Life as they knew it is rapidly disintegrating for the villagers, escalating tensions and directing suspicion toward anyone from elsewhere.

Gorgeously photographed on 16mm by Sean Price Williams, Harvest immerses us in a pre-industrial world of pagan rituals and small-scale agriculture that appears so different from ours, though its conflicts are familiar. This is a haunting story about what it means to forge a community only to have a calamitous combination of outside greed and internal paranoia take it all away.

ROBYN CITIZEN

Content advisory: violence, sexual innuendo