DIR:: Athina Rachel Tsangari | Cast: Caleb Landry Jones, Harry Melling, Rosy McEwen | 2025. 131′
Reviewed by Ian Long
Athina Rachel Tsangari‘s Harvest begins with a bearded, berobed man – later identified as Walter Thirsk – frolicking and gambolling in a natural landscape, running, leaping, toying delightedly with small creatures, even gnawing on a mossy branch.
It’s not clear where – or even when – we are. Walt’s home village looks medieval, but the inhabitants speak in a modern-day Scottish argot with occasional poetic flourishes. Are we in the past, or a future, post-apocalyptic world? Although some of these questions are resolved, a sense of indeterminacy lingers, adding interesting tensions to the story.
Walt’s community is about to celebrate its harvest festival, but an unexpected fire destroys the barn where the grain is stored. This is just the first in a succession of events which open up the community to powerful, as-yet-unseen forces, ultimately dislodging it from its seemingly settled way of life.
The term ‘precariat’ is often used to talk about people with unstable incomes, like workers in the contemporary gig economy. But Harvest suggests that feudal communities were history’s real precariat. ‘Timeless’ ways of life were vulnerable to the whims of aristocratic landowners with little or no interest in the people leading them, other than as sponges to be squeezed dry of revenue and discarded when economic times change.
Harvest is a complex film that weaves a number of volatile strands, and it benefits from some strong, committed performances. Caleb Landry Jones is touchingly convincing as the thoughtful, visionary Walt, a non-native of the village who eventually proves his deep love for the land, and Arinzé Kene is memorable as Earle, the cartographer whose endearing manner conceals dark secrets.
These men, both outsiders, form a bond which is fatally compromised in the course of the story. Earle is employed to document the topography of the village – a seemingly benign occupation with which Walt enthusiastically lends a hand, proud to show off the riches of the countryside to a newcomer – until he finds out the purpose of Earle’s task, with which he is now unwittingly complicit.
However, some of the other performances (Harry Melling as a craven, ineffectual ‘laird’ and Frank Dillane as his villainous, sneering, figuratively moustache-twirling cousin) detract from the film. It feels that two strong actors have been coerced into near-caricatural portrayals by a director’s loathing for everything their characters represent. This doesn’t work dramatically, and risks turning an otherwise well-made drama into agitprop.
For these and other reasons Harvest is an uneven film, but it’s still an original and compelling one. And evenness plainly isn’t what it’s striving for. Its various anomalies, inconsistencies and anachronisms often seem consciously foregrounded, as if to acknowledge the essential impossibility of recreating a historical era onscreen.
Harvest reminded me of Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978), in which an entire Italian village is evicted by a capricious landowner simply because one man cuts down a tree in order to make shoes for his children. Tsangari is plainly angry about this kind of injustice, and feels it personally – Harvest is dedicated to her grandparents, “whose farmland is now a highway”. But she needs to remember that bad people don’t necessarily behave in ways that proclaim their intentions.
Visually, the film takes many cues from the paintings of Pieter Bruegel, with long shots of peasants in red and blue picked out against verdant landscapes, and the repeated, striking image of a wicker beekeeper’s helmet echoing a famous drawing by the artist. It has the grainy look of chemical rather than digital stock, which, along with a restrained use of hand-held camera, gives it a pungent, near-documentary feel. Ian Long
IN UK AND IRISH CINEMAS | 18 JULY 2025
MUBI | 8 AUGUST 2025