Time and place are how we define ourselves. Yet when Scottish farm laborer Walter Thirsk (Jones) first appears, he could be from anywhen, draped in rough woollen garb that could be fitting for a peasant any time from the departure of the Romans to the smoky first gasps of the industrial revolution. As Harvest progresses, it becomes clear that it takes place nearer the end of that era. In adapting Jim Crace’s novel of the same name, director Athina Rachel Tsangari has transferred the narrative from an unnamed part of pre-industrial England to the East coast of Scotland during the Scottish Agricultural Revolution, when enduring ways of life were sacrificed in the name of efficiency. By creating that sense of historical and geographic distance, Tsangari stirs evocative emotions about questions of identity and displacement rather than relying on heavy-handed polemic.
Walter, it soon becomes clear, is not truly of this place. Relocated there by his childhood friend, Mayor Kent (Melling), he is the man below the man above, too educated to be truly one of the community and yet too lowborn to be a gentleman. While Kent is the laird of the manor, Walter is his kind hand within the community of subsistence farm workers who toil on his lands in return for food, a roof, and the freedom to live in their own fashion. Kent aspires to that same connection but when Melling – watery-eyed and pensive – wears peasant garb it seems like affectation.
Writer/director Tsangari is often incorrectly pigeonholed as merely an associate of Yorgos Lanthimos, even though she has not worked with the high priest of the Greek New Weird since Alps in 2011. As a graduate of UT Austin’s RTF program, she is also connected with Richard Linklater, having co-produced Before Midnight and appeared as “Greek Cousin” in Slacker. But as a director she is more akin to another famous Austinite, Terrence Malick, in that she constructs narrative through observation and character rather than events. Her eye drifts across landscapes, settling on bugs and leaves, letting the characters silently interact with the wonder around them. That said, his brand of pastoralism is given a coating of filthy authenticity by Tsangari and cinematographer Sean Price Williams, who brings the same kind of lived-in authenticity with which he imbued Good Time and Between the Temples.
In many ways, this is a miserable existence, but for Walter and the farm workers it is the world. Landry, through his purposefully mumbled performance and a voiceover taken from Crace’s text, gives Walter a wild ease. He is enraptured by this land at a primal level, yet guarded and somewhat calculating. His efforts to protect the community from not-so-accidental mishaps – a fire, a dead horse, a trio of interlopers – end up killing them through kindness. The untold ages of tradition in this place are eradicated in less than a week.
Tsangari suggests that describing something destroys it, as shown by a cartographer (Kene) assigned to map the property and the new laird of the manor (Dillane), who see the land but do not understand it. The old residents have a much more emotional relationship to this place and their strange ways, as if Tsangari and co-writer Joslyn Barnes are trying to liberate what have become the indicators of folklore from the grasp of folk horror. There’s a profound mournfulness to this elegiac portrait of the end of an era, given greater poignancy by Jones’ understated performance. In the context of questions of belonging, his sometimes wonky accent seems like a deliberate choice, part of Walter’s doomed dream to be part of this community that was never really his.
This article appears in August 8 • 2025.
