Imagine if The Witch had a nervous breakdown while reading Karl Marx. That's Harvest—a film that seduces you with sun-drenched landscapes before slicing open your soul.
The newly released trailer for Harvest, directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari (Chevalier, Attenberg), is a masterclass in tonal whiplash. What starts as an idyllic pastoral tale—goats grazing, village life basking in candlelit serenity—quickly devolves into something far darker: land theft, social fracture, and the raw cost of progress. Caleb Landry Jones stars as Walter Thirsk, a servant turned witness to the slow disintegration of his medieval Scottish village.
Shot on film and wrapped in Sean Price Williams' natural-light cinematography, Harvest doesn't just look like a Renaissance painting—it feels like one bleeding at the edges. The quote that sticks like a thorn: “We have become link animals. Goat drunk and lecherous.” Not exactly your average costume drama.
This isn't Tsangari's first foray into societal dissection. Her 2015 satire Chevalier explored fragile masculinity through a yacht-bound pissing contest. Harvest is less playful, more primal. Think less Monty Python, more Andrei Tarkovsky with dirt under his nails.
There's a deeper historical echo here. The film, based on Jim Crace's novel, eerily mirrors the English Enclosure Acts—where shared land was privatized, and rural communities were shattered. It also rhymes with modern displacement: the trailer's themes of “outsiders,” “company men,” and “map-makers” feel like archetypes from our own headlines. It's not a stretch to call this a parable for post-Brexit Britain or late-stage capitalism.
Critics at Venice 2024 were split, some praising its cerebral carnality, others squirming at its bleak fatalism. And fair—the back half of the film reportedly spirals into full-on tragedy, with the brutality that comes when power meets the plow.
If you're expecting redemption, look elsewhere. Harvest isn't here to console—it's here to confess. And it might leave you wondering: If the land could speak, would it scream?
So—would you risk watching your world fall apart for the sake of “progress”?
Let's hear it below.
