Harvest

A magnetic Caleb Landry Jones stars in this moody medieval parable adapted from a Booker Prize–shortlisted novel.

Walter (Caleb Landry Jones, Nitram, MIFF Premiere Fund 2021) watches on as his remote English village is rocked by a series of arrivals: three unwanted outsiders; a cartographer, who seeks to literally put the town on the map; and a despotic new estate lord, who upends the locals’ arcadian social order. But Walter himself is from elsewhere, finding kinship only in his lover Kitty (Rosy McEwen, Blue Jean, MIFF 2023) and the land’s former administrator, Master Kent. With modernity and the possibility of ever more intrusions on the horizon, he and the townsfolk must face what will become of their beloved home.

Directed by Greek auteur Athina Rachel Tsangari (Attenberg, MIFF 2011), shot in evocative 16mm by Sean Price Williams (The Sweet East, MIFF 2023) and assembly edited by Australian filmmaker Alena Lodkina (Petrol, MIFF 2022), this adaptation of Jim Crace’s novel of the same name is a sagacious, at times humorous portrait of small-town small-mindedness and humanity’s complicated bond with the land. With its gorgeously realised pre-industrial setting and Jones’s lodestone performance, Harvest sharply captures how communities fall prey to apathetic complicity, especially when capitalism jars with the common good. Premiering in competition at Venice, Tsangari’s first English-language feature reaps a powerful and timely tale from a utopia on the verge of collapse.

“Brawny, brutal, beautiful … As a feat of world-building – and later, world-dismantling – Harvest consistently dazzles, creating a convincingly unified and imperiled ecosystem.” – Variety