Harvest: a sensuous and surreal anti-capitalist allegory

The films of Athina Rachel Tsangari are preoccupied by the stranger corners of human behaviour, the rituals and mannerisms we perform to assert power or form connections. Attenberg (2010), her breakout second feature, plays with heightened gestures of femininity to convey the alienation of a young woman’s coming of age, while in Chevalier (2015) an Aegean yacht trip turns into a battle for supremacy as the all-male sailors demonstrate their masculinity in a series of ritualised contests.

On the surface Harvest, Tsangari’s first English-language feature, is a change of pace, a sprawling, viscerally conjured historical drama set in a long-ago rural Scotland, sticky with mud and gore. But beneath the shifts in aesthetics and scale, Tsangari’s thematic concerns are largely unchanged. The film continues Tsangari’s obsession with ritual and custom, and with the dynamics of power and identity that alienate humans from one another. And fascinatingly, although Harvest is set some centuries in the past, it shares the scepticism of capitalist progress central to the work Tsangari (who also produced Yorgos Lanthimos’s early features) made in Greece in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Seen in this context, Harvest is as an origin story for Tsangari’s anti-capitalist satires, an allegory set in a pre-modern, pre-industrial time, which shrieks with contemporary relevance, even if the topical themes – from environmental exploitation to the migrant crisis – are punctuated by literal witch hunts.

Adapted from Jim Crace’s Booker-shortlisted novel of 2013, Harvest centres on Walt (Caleb Landry Jones), a farmer living in a tiny community in remote Scotland. Walt, a former townsman, is a rare outsider, but has managed to slowly integrate despite the territorial villagers’ intense xenophobia, aided by a childhood friendship with bumbling Master Kent (Harry Melling, in a wonderfully judged performance), who rules the village with inept benevolence. Since anyone can remember, the villagers have lived humbly but sustainably, hard seasons working the fields punctuated by cathartic drunken feasts. This relative contentment is shattered, however, by the arrival of a series of strangers – a map-maker (Arinzé Kene) commissioned to chart the land, three migrants fleeing a crisis, and an aristocratic company man (Frank Dillane) determined to improve the efficiency of Kent’s operations. The villagers respond to these arrivals with violence, the escalating consequences of which soon threaten their community’s very existence.

That Harvest is an allegory is clear, but focusing on contemporary resonances risks obscuring its power as multi-sensory filmmaking. It is earthy in the extreme, a riot of textures – boggy marshland, rustling reeds, swaying grasses. The first image we see, of a human arm moving through a field, brushing past golden ears of wheat, sets a sensuous, surreal tone. There follows a sequence where Walt traverses the landscape in a state of reverie – swimming naked in a loch, caressing the ground with dirt-encrusted fingernails, taking a bite out of a mossy branch. Tsangari thrusts her viewers into the sights, sounds and smells of the landscape, rubs our faces in the lush aliveness of it all.

She is aided by inventive cinematography by Sean Price Williams, who translates the 16mm photography he has channelled with the Safdies and Alex Ross Perry as part of New York ’s indie scene, into the boggy beauty of rural Scotland, playing with handheld camerawork and natural light. In a breathtaking early shot, Walt is introduced to the idea of mapmaking: the camera swoops upwards into a bird’s-eye perspective, swooningly reframing the village through Walt’s newly opened eyes.

It is one of many gorgeous sequences, but, Harvest is disorienting as often as it is beautiful. Scenes of the villagers working in the fields or extinguishing a fire resemble Bruegel paintings, busy with odd details and flat perspective, while scenes of nocturnal feasting and vigilante justice carry the phantasmagorical tinge of 1970s folk horror. This is no pastoral romance; on the contrary, it is a film steeped in the darkest impulses, the despair implicit in the natural world’s cosmic disregard for our fates and the cruelty inherent in human nature. When the village’s tentative equilibrium collapses into chaos, Walt’s eyes are opened to more than just the lay of the land. As his illusions of belonging crumble, Harvest’s strange magic tightens its grip.

► Harvest is in UK cinemas 18 July.