'Harvest' Leaves an Impression Instead of an Impact

The winds of change have reached a remote coastal village, and, in the space of a week, all signs of life will be swallowed whole by the pressing urges of modernity. It’s a place too insignificant for the film Harvest to disclose where or when it is; the audience is cloistered together with a community on the verge of sublimating into a larger whole, but who will keep infighting until the displacement takes hold. The film, adapting the celebrated 2013 novel by Jim Crace, imagines an “enclosure”, the like of which were common in Britain’s Agricultural Revolution in the 17th century.

(The Scottish Highland and Lowland Clearances have extra resonance for Harvest’s story, as it was filmed in Oban, Scotland).

Master Kent (Henry Melling) is the fair but meek laird who owns the estate where the agrarian commune is dwelling, but the arrival of three unwanted drifters is immediately treated as a bad omen among the villagers – or maybe easy culprits to blame for a motiveless barn fire that happened just previously. The strangers – two men (Gary Maitland and Noor Dillan-Night) and one woman (Thalissa Teixeira) – are quickly scapegoated and strung up on the pillory in the hopes that their subjugation will soothe the unsettled atmosphere and bring back normalcy. But a different, more respectable arrival soon attracts the ire of the suspicious village folk – a Black cartographer, Quill (Arinzé Kene) who has been hired to create a detailed, up-to-date map of Kent’s estate.