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Harvest isn't a traditional folk horror movie, but it brings shades of rural dread to Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari's latest feature.
Tsangari is no stranger to the weird and wonderful. She's worked as a producer on several of Yorgos Lanthimos' movies – including family psychodrama Dogtooth – and co-wrote her last feature, 2015's Chevalier, with Lanthimos' frequent collaborator Efthymis Filippou.
Set in a remote Scottish village in a vaguely medieval time period, Caleb Landry Jones plays Walter, a villager who's not quite an outsider but not quite a local. "Just a visitor who stayed," he tells another character at one point. A childhood friend and former manservant of the lord of the manor, Master Kent (Harry Melling), Walter arrived in the village after his master married a local noblewoman, and Walter left the manor when he also fell in love with a local woman. Now, both men are widowers, but their unequal friendship lives on.
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The film establishes its pastoral setting in its opening sequence with hazy, golden hour shots on grainy 16mm film (Sean Price Williams, best known for his collaborations with the Safdies, was on hand as cinematographer). Walter roams the land alone in a contented daze with tactile, childlike fascination with the flora and fauna around him. This is immediately contrasted with a cut to the village's barn on fire in the middle of the night: peaceful greenery becomes darkness and chaos.
The latter sets the tone for the rest of the movie far more effectively than the former. In the light of the next day, we learn that someone burned down the barn and stole some of the doves inside. No one knows who did it and no one wants to own up, but the sudden arrival of several strangers soon provides the perfect scapegoat. This isn't a settlement used to newcomers – it's at least two days on horseback to the nearest town, so people don't just wander through.
Three of these strangers are intruders, spotted down by the loch, but the fourth is a guest of Master Kent's: Mr. Earle, who's been charged with mapping the land. He may be there by invitation of their lord, but Earle is Black, and the villagers still treat him with distrust (and, in some cases, disgust).
The line between community and exclusion is a thin one, and looks different depending on which side you're standing on. There's a violence to the tight-knit village in Harvest, made manifest by a strange ritual that involves the children of the community having their heads bumped, hard, against the settlement's boundary stones, "so they know where they belong."
Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's recent re-team for zombie sequel 28 Years Later explored similar themes, giving the post-apocalyptic series a folk horror twist as the countryside of northeast England became a site of death and isolationism. The island where Jodie Comer's Isla lives with her young son Spike is cut off from the mainland where the infected roam and, therefore, safe, but it's also a place that feels claustrophobic, archaic, and glorifies violence (and, in the case of one of the movie's earlier scenes, violence carried out by children). Closing ranks, for whatever reason, always results in the exclusion of the other. And, as Walter learns eventually in Harvest, no one is really safe when we batten down the hatches.
Harvest is out now in UK cinemas. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.
