Jim Crace’s Booker-shortlisted ‘home and hearth’ novel Harvest doesn’t feel like a natural fit for a film adaptation. Set in an unspecified (and unnamed) English village sometime in the Middle Ages, its first-person narrator is largely a watchful bystander – hardly a role made for a leading man – and its prose is right on the border of poetry. I mean, how do you put ‘the muffled sneezing of a skulking snipe’ on film?
Greek director Tsangari’s adaptation transposes the nameless village to Scotland, where peasants like widower Walter Thirsk (Nitram’s Caleb Landry Jones) toil in the soil, eking out a hardscrabble existence under the benign but ineffectual stewardship of Master Kent (Harry Melling). Outsiders like cartographer ‘Quill’ (Arinzé Kene), whose map-making skills are so technologically advanced as to be labelled ‘magic’ by Thirsk, are treated with suspicion by the villagers, so when the burning of a barn coincides with the arrival of three newcomers, they are immediately blamed and punished. The villagers are right to be wary: Quill’s cartography is revealed to be the first step in a process by which their land will be stolen from the folk who have worked it for centuries. ‘They mean to throw a halter around our lives,’ Thirsk’s friend says. How else did ‘the landed gentry’ come by their land?
It goes from hallucinatory period pastoral towards Horrible Histories territory
At first, Tsangari – producer of several of her countryman Yorgos Lanthimos’ early films and director of the Lanthimos-like Attenberg (2010) – takes a Malickian lens to the heavy-on-atmosphere-but-light-on-plot source text. Jones’s laconic voiceover, juxtaposed with autumnal images of wheatfields and farm folk, cannot help but recall Days of Heaven, while the specificity of medieval life echoes Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. Throw in strong performances, beguiling period-perfect music, a tantalising batsqueak of folk-horror, and the early establishment of hallucinogenic fairy-cap mushrooms – surely destined to inspire some prismatic photography from the Safdie brothers’ immensely talented cinematographer Sean Price Williams – and Harvest seems ripe for greatness.
Unfortunately, Tsangari and co-screenwriter Joslyn Barnes – Oscar nominated for her adaptation of Nickel Boys – seem to lose their nerve about halfway through. Jones’s voiceover, which might have mitigated his passivity on screen, is ruthlessly cut back, and the ripe potential of folk-horror and psychedelia never materialises. The diverse casting of Kene and Thalissa Teixeira (as suspected sorceress ‘Miss Beldam’) overstates the ‘fear of the outsider’ subtext, an unforced error that misunderstands, or at least muddies, the metaphor of the source text.
By the time some comically exaggerated English villains have arrived, the film has veered away from a hallucinatory period pastoral towards Horrible Histories territory, and never recovers.
In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Jul 18.