Long hair and mustache, wading through a cornfield, a beetle on the fingertip, skinny dipping in the lake: it’s only the long robe of protagonist Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landy Jones) that hints at the fact that this isn’t an LSD trip at the Fusion Festival, but about a farmer in 18th century England.

Back in the village, the natural idyll is shattered, Thirsk experiences the inferno of a burning barn and the first divisions in the dense collective of the farming community, which will continue to open up over the course of the film. The loss of peasant livelihoods, which HARVEST recounts, is driven by the violence of capitalist land grabs, the so-called enclosures: Since the 15th century, farmers have been driven from communally cultivated land to be replaced by profitable privately owned grazing land. HARVEST doesn’t reverse the contradictions into a fight between good and evil, David and Goliath, but rather follows the cracks created by the capitalist enclosure of the land and the ramifications in the increasingly xenophobic village community and the opportunist-plagued consciences of its members. Despite this, director Athina Rachel Tsangari (CHEVALIER) does introduce a classic villain which robs the film of some of its complexity but does give it more entertainment value. When mushroom-headed arch-capitalist Jordan (Frank Dillane) rides into the village, you can almost hear the title melody of BARRY LYNDON; HARVEST sometimes looks like the 70s cinema of Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky. The director never succumbs to historicism, but rather handles her complex subject matter confidently, entertainingly and with perfectly measured formal experiments.

Yorick Berta (INDIEKINO MAGAZIN)

Translation: Elinor Lewy