Harvest builds a pastoral world so visually and sonically stunning that at first it may feel like a respite. It’s feral in an almost fantastical way, but that soon turns into something more familiar. Over seven hallucinatory days that remain socially relevant despite being set in an undefined time and place, director Athina Rachel Tsangari immerses viewers in a modest village on the precipice of significant and seemingly inevitable change. When a building goes up in flames, it’s the first crack of many, and the mood shifts from serene to severe. Three unknown drifters are blamed and punished for the misdeed. This outcome, which lacks any proof, does not sit well with villager Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones); he’s somewhat of a misfit among men, given his disinterest in control and his preference for living in harmony with nature. When yet another group of unknowns arrives in the village, any hope Thirsk or viewers may have for a return to peace yields to the threat of modernity they come bearing. Harvest is a sprawling, atmospheric film that asks, “How many times are we going to do this?” While the answer, of course, is “forever,” the existence of the film is proof that just as the force of man can continually work to destroy, the culmination of human effort is also capable of creating something worthwhile over and over again. 133 min.
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