Harvest (2024) review

He moves through the long grass. He swims in the river, studies the ground, worries the blades between finger and thumb. Small smiles and a warmth of touch drift across the screen. An insect lingers on a roughened hand; coarse, soil-like noise scuds across the image. His hands, torso and face are sliced fine by the cut; his eyes fix on a butterfly and pick at the forest’s grain. Different fabrics clasp the edges of the frame; the camera keeps following a man. Walter Thorskes (Caleb Landry Jones) seems full to the brim. His unsteady body threads through space, moving across the plain. The moments are brief yet slow to unspool; the sensation left at the fingertips outlasts the after-image. He reads the nap of the landscape, and the landscape, for a moment, holds him.

Then fire ruptures the drift: flames rise at the edge of the village, the byre flowers up out of the earth. Smoke fills the frame; shadows shake themselves loose. The barn of the laird, Charles Kent (Harry Melling), is ablaze; people run to and fro with water. In the churn, Walter’s feelings catch and flare. Laughter carries; it’s hard to tell whether they are drunk or whether Walter alone is keeping his head. We are somewhere in a small Scottish hamlet. The exact date and coordinates scarcely matter. Walter Thorskes lives here, as does his old friend and lord, Charles Kent. Among those clothed in the same tones, Kent alone wears red, a simple band of difference. The flame is an event and a line. It draws borders: between person and person, between us and them, between land and the words we use for it.

Everyone knows everyone. Walter belongs, and he does not. He threshes with the others; he helps bring in the wheat. Yet his voice-over keeps telling us his heart is not lodged in this place. The voice comes from outside and, in doing so, throws an oblique light on the inside. New bodies arrive, as if the village’s quiet emotions had taken fire: three strangers found near the river, and a cartographer, Philip Quill Earl (Arinzé Kene), hired by Kent. They are new events, new affects, importers of a new village. Their speech sits at an angle; from the start they snag on the locals. Two of the strangers are pinned as scapegoats; the woman—Mistress Beldam (Talisa Teixeira)—has her hair shorn and is driven into the woods. Some viewers will feel the discomfort of it; others, in the world of the film, gather the cut hair as if it were fleece. That, perhaps, is the outsider’s place: to be sheared off, tied up, sorted; to be named, wound into skeins, counted as stock.

Helping Earl map, Walter tells the village’s stories—really, of course, his own: the mushrooms he used to eat, the grasses on the plain. But stories do not interest Earl. He is not shopping for incidents. He wants names, categories, the now, not a chain of recollection. On his sheets the village is enumerated and trimmed to contour lines; people are counted, plots are traced, localities are tagged. The village compacts into concept, abstracted and summarised. For Earl, the village is only ever a present soon to be past; once he leaves, the map is what remains. A map flattens. It speaks of length, not of height; it renders no smell when you walk, no pattern for the heart to beat to. Paper lies flat; feet answer to corrugation. Coordinates are precise; breath is not. I wondered whether Walter regretted, later, having shown Kent’s and his wives’ graves and asking Earl to inscribe them. When a coordinate is laid over a site of mourning, whose coordinate is it?

The “we” that enforces itself in the village excludes, and Walter and Kent are not quite gathered within it. Both are outsiders by origin. Kent came by way of his wife, onto her lands. Walter met a woman here, fell in love, and stayed. Neither man was born nor raised in the village; both are perceived as from elsewhere. On this narrow ledge their paths diverge. Kent chooses to be open-handed and tender, to shrug off his laird’s coat and blend in. His horse sleeps in the byre; his wife’s mansion grows a skin of dust. Walter, by contrast, keeps to the threshold. He shares feeling with Kitty Goss (Rosy McEwen), a widowed villager, yet he avoids the kiss and refuses the deepening of the tie. Unlike the newly arrived strangers he passes more easily among the people, yet he also holds himself at a remove, doubting that he is of the village. Is it because he was not born here? Because he did not grow up here? Because he never knocked his head, like the village children, on the boundary stone at the edge of the settlement? Walter’s voice drifts outside the frame; his gaze slides into the air; his heart pools in the past. What makes him an outsider? A body and a mind that won’t cross the line—or a habit of hesitation, the wish to cross held in check.

The screw tightens with the arrival of Edmund Jordan (Frank Dillane), kinsman to Kent’s late wife and legal owner of the land, flanked by armed men. He translates the village into numbers: broad acres into sheep counts and profit tables; people into units of labour; the village into a plan to be fenced and parcelled. At the same time, Willowjack—the horse that tethered Kent to the community—is found slaughtered. It is no wonder Kent’s mind turns outward; his wife has gone, his horse too. For a man who wanted to live here, the future no longer seems lodged in this place. Jordan orders house-to-house searches. The strangers and the map-maker fall under suspicion; women in weak positions and a child are seized. More “witches’” names are forced from their mouths. The cartographer is both outsider and other, an easy target. And yet how to sympathise with Quill? He is the man who pressed the village flat, who annihilated it into an image. One of the tied strangers, bound to a shearing frame for days, dies in foul weather under a boar. Jordan accelerates the village’s erasure: the language of law is swift; the lines of the map are swifter.

Kent yields the keys to Walter and, with them, the village’s future. Can a place emptied of its people still claim a future? Walter sows seeds, but his leaving pushes them into the past. The villagers flee, afraid of soldiers; Kent gives himself up to Jordan. Because of Walter, the outsiders who refused the reduction of their names—and Mistress Beldam—escape the net and leave the village. What remains in the hollow are borders thickened on paper. Fire returns. The present burns; Quill’s corpse is left behind; the landscape floats up as smoke. The flame licks the last lines clean; ash crumbles like a sheet of paper. Who, in the end, has the right to draw this place? A map is record and execution; a name is summons and banishment. Only at the very last does Walter answer the past—threading his doubtful body between lines, knocking his head against the boundary stone, offering his hesitation up as an answer.

The film’s method is tactile and simple. It sets the camera at the height of the hand, the chest, the face; it lets fabrics fray the frame; it leaves time to lengthen—short moments, slow durations. Sound is allowed to spill ahead of picture, to prime attention; laughter rings against smoke; a low unrest sits in the middle distance like weather. There are the plain facts of a fire, a map, a village; there is also the vibration between them: lines that mark property and lines that cut people; names that hold and names that push away. The work keeps returning to this: what is it to be “from here”, and what work do images and words do in making and unmaking that claim? It is a film about edges that won’t stay still, and about the small, stubborn textures—of skin, grass, breath—that refuse to be flattened.