Sheep, Sheep, Sheep: Tsangari’s Monotonous Treatise on Modernization
Adapted from a novel by Jim Croce, Harvest is Greek auteur Athina Rachel Tsangari‘s third feature narrative, and, unfortunately, also her least effective. Described as the director’s take on the Western genre which aims to depict “the trauma of modernity,” it instead plays like a glacially paced bit of folk horror as concerns an unnamed time and place where an obscure farming community has been deemed an obsolete outpost to its money hungry landowners. While an aggressive edit of about thirty minutes from its two-hour plus run time might make its endlessly repetitive interactions feel a bit less languorous, a lack of tension and characterization robs this moral fable from conjuring any real emotional impact. The film is set in the last week of this unnamed village, its inhabitants unaware of their impending dissolution.
Arsonists have burned down the village barn which houses Master Kent’s (Henry Melling) prized horse, Willowjack. His good friend and manservant Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones) saves the horse from immolation, and perhaps knows who’s responsible among them for starting the blaze, but chooses to remain silent. As it so happens, they discover a trio of strangers on the edge of a river nearby, apprehending them, convinced they’re responsible for the fire. The two men are sentenced to the pillory for one week, their female companion shorn of her long hair and set loose, doomed to roam the woods on the outskirts of the village as she awaits the release of the men. But the act causes unease among the residents, who aren’t so sure they did the right thing. When one of the captives dies, he’s yanked from his confines just when Kent’s cousin-through-marriage Master Jordan (Frank Dillane), who is the actual owner of the land, arrives. He informs Kent of his intent to reconfigure this land for sheep, seeing as the villagers are no longer turning a profit with their output. Suddenly, someone kills dear Willowjack, requiring them to identify another scapegoat, forcing Kent and Walter to take a side.
While the look of the film intrigues, with DP Sean Price Williams concocting the kind of mise en scene ripe for sinister ambience, there’s an inescapable sense of play acting whenever there are any communal sequences. At a certain point, we’re left wondering if Tsangari has crafted a twist ending akin to M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004), where we’d learn these characters are actually living in modern times and have willingly sequestered themselves to an isolated clime where they can exist in tranquility as self-sufficient luddites.
The purposeful lack of a specified time or place keeps its allegorical insinuations intact, but this often seems to work against any other aspects of authenticity, including the casting. Caleb Landry Jones promises to be a sympathetic protagonist as Walter, who we meet being more physically intimate with the orifices of a tree than the sexual relationship he has with Kitty, the local widow played by Rosy McEwen (of Blue Jean, 2022). The strain his inaction eventually causes ultimately feels rather inert, despite the long passages of exposition which detail his current state as a widower.
Whilst the villagers agonize over what to do with the pilloried interlopers, unfairly assumed to have been responsible for the barn burning which opens the film, the narrative intention doesn’t arrive until late into the film when Frank Dillane’s sinister Master Jordan arrives, with a bowl-cut and a sneer suggesting the air of an adolescent Vincent Price. Arinze Kene, who’s on hand as an intriguing cartographer creating elaborate drawings of the area, is charged with re-mapping the location not as it is but how it will be following Jordan’s agrarian gentrification. Alas, both Master Kent and Walter are revealed to be the somewhat spineless pacifists the film has painstakingly led us to believe they are, but no matter of razing seems to heighten the temperature of this lukewarm endeavor. Bookended in flames, Harvest ironically never achieves even a tepid boil, only succeeding in suggesting its rather unsympathetic villagers are complicit in the endless cycle of ignorance and xenophobia which allows for the landowners to control them invisibly from afar.
Reviewed on September 3rd at the 2024 Venice Film Festival (81st edition) – In Competition section. 131 Mins
★★/☆☆☆☆☆