Harvest

In a Scottish coastal village, fear of famine grips the community as the year’s harvest has failed. There are three ways to respond. First, one can prepare for a long journey to beg for help from distant and wealthy nobles or royalty. Second, one can listen to strangers who happen by—suspicious visitors such as a cartographer (Arinzé Kene) or an efficiency-minded smooth-talker (Frank Dillane)—who claim to know tricks and schemes to save the crops. And third, one can vent one’s dissatisfaction on a marginalised outsider whom no one particularly cares about (Caleb Landry Jones). For this widower, it is in his own interest to make the villagers invest their efforts in one of the other courses of action.

Subtle satirist and keen observer of humanity’s less savory behaviors, Athina Rachel Tsangari (Chevalier, R&A 2016) returns with what may be her most ambitious work yet, examining how a village community behaves under pressure and drifts off course. Although the film is set in the past, its depiction of economic hardship and a highly segregated society, saturated with xenophobia and narrow-mindedness, clearly serves as an allegory for contemporary issues as well.

The film’s rich and vivid illustration of nature evokes, at times, the work of Terrence Malick, and at others, 1970s folk horror films. The cinematography itself tells a part of the story: the delicate balance with nature must be earned through hard labour, and yet it remains unpredictable.

Paavo Ihalainen (translated by Kati Ilomäki)