‘Harvest’ Review – Mesmerizing Middle Ages Tale Of Displacement And Inaction [NYFF 2024]

As the great Winston Churchill allegedly said, “History is written by the victors.” History may be grounded in fact, but not necessarily objective truth capturing a whole picture. People get left out of the history books, and those who ultimately fall short often don’t get to tell their side of things. Stories of whole groups being displaced and wiped out plague humanity’s past and sadly seem to persist into the future. Athina Rachel Tsangari’s dreamy feature, Harvest, finds Caleb Landry Jones’ Walter Thirsk caught in the midst of a small-scale effort to displace a small English village during the Middle Ages. Featuring a supporting cast of Harry Melling, Rosy McEwan, and Arinze Kene, the film depicts seven days in the life of this village as it slowly begins to disappear to the rest of the world.

There’s tension between the townspeople and Master Kent (Melling) from the outset of the film, with an anonymous arsonist setting one of his buildings ablaze. With no one coming forward to confess to the crime, those not involved are on the hunt for someone to blame. The following day, as the self-sustaining village gets back to work, a trio of outsiders are discovered wandering the grounds and are quickly blamed for the fire without a shred of evidence showing they’re to blame. Sounds like due process wasn’t on people’s minds back in the day. 

The audience proxy into this village is Walter, a former outsider who had been childhood buddies with Master Kent who is now married to one of the villagers and has stuck around for several years. He lives in the village with everyone else but acts as the middle-man between them and Master Kent, seen as the de facto leader they can turn to when needed. Despite this prominent position, there’s a sense of apathy and dread that follows Walter throughout the film, almost as if he’s nearly comatose yet able to walk through life. He barely speaks, and when he does it’s borderline unintelligible. Much of the film features Walter floating from place to place wrapped in a warm blanket simply observing what others are doing without any active role. He’s at his most alert when helping Quill (Kene), a traveling cartographer, craft a map of the land they live on, only to discover he’s there to make it seem as if the village has never existed so the land can be sold and utilized for commerce. 

Jones’ performance is mesmerizing, and he passes the “this guy’s never seen an iPhone” test with flying colors. As Kent and Kene’s intentions become abundantly clear to everyone else, tensions begin to rise and Walter retreats into his own psyche. His indifference to the impending doom of the place he calls home is fascinating to see and shows the other side of what can happen when an outsider becomes enmeshed within a community. He doesn’t really care about any of these people, not even his wife. He has the standing to push back against what is happening to them, yet does nothing. Meandering through these final days his inaction leads to violent outbursts from others, a last-ditch effort to save their home from being wiped from the history books. 

The dream-like Scottish countryside was shot on film using almost all natural light by The Sweet East director and experienced cinematographer Sean Price Williams. The beautiful landscape depicted on grainy film perfectly captures the hallucinatory vibe of the film and grounds it in its time. Slow camera movements mirror Walter’s leisurely pace as he walks through the village as if nothing’s happening around him. The camera follows his sense of urgency, not anyone else’s. Like Walter, we are emotionally removed from the situation and aren’t compelled to help. This emotional distance is palpable throughout the whole film, and Jones’ body language says it all. 

I can’t help but draw comparisons to No Other Land, a contemporary documentary also shown at this year’s New York Film Festival that follows an Israeli Yuval as he helps to document the occupation and displacement of Palestinians in West Bank’s Masafar Yatta region. Similar to Walter, Yuval is an outsider choosing to live in a small village of people constantly battling outside forces who are trying to take their land. In this case, however, Yuval takes action with Palestinian activist Basel and his family as they fight back against those who seek to eliminate them. The urgency of No Other Land is something unmatched in any other film this year and honestly acts as the antidote to the apathy shown by Walter in Harvest. 

Harvest’s gorgeous cinematography coupled with Caleb Landry Jones’ spellbinding performance produces a compelling tale about the inaction of the powerful few and how it completely removes the many from collective memory. Tsangari reminds us that emotional or physical distance from injustice does not always remove us from being complicit in those injustices.

Harvest held its U.S. Premiere as part of the Main Slate section at the 2024 New York Film Festival.

Director: Athina Rachel Tsangari

Writers: Joslyn Barnes, Athina Rachel Tsangari

Rated: NR

Runtime: 131m