Caleb Landry Jones, Harry Melling, Rosy McEwen, Arinzé Kene
Athena Rachel Tsangari – one of Greece’s ‘Weird Wave’ filmmakers alongside Yorgos Lanthimos – returns to filmmaking, following up her portrait of male anxiety Chevalier (2015) with an imaginative take on the period film. Shot in Argyllshire, Scotland, Harvest is a panorama of village life in the wake of a mysterious stable fire. Three outsiders to the community are blamed, but these are not the only forces pressing in, as a cartographer (Arinzé Kene) and an entrepreneur (Frank Dillane) arrive, bringing modern ideas that unsettle the communal notions laid out by landowner Master Kent (Harry Melling). Outcast Thirsk (Caleb Landry-Jones) acts as go-between between the factions in this soon-to-bubble-over melting pot.
Adapting Jim Crace’s novel, production designer Nathan Parker and cinematographer Sean Price Williams (The Sweet East) have brought an authentically unrefined and rough-hewn edge to this freewheeling period piece. Refusing to be tied to a particular historical moment, Tsangari instead uses a more abstract sense of the past to open up possibilities that are foreclosed in our present. All too familiar to the modern eye will be the paranoia, misogyny and avarice of the community. A singular act of world-building from one of modern cinema’s most exciting voices.