The strange feeling of living through turning points in history has become a shared experience in twenty twenty five, acknowledged openly by some and avoided by others who prefer routine and denial until the ground moves under their feet all at once. Athina Rachel Tsangari’s film Harvest follows a small community in a nameless Scottish settlement in an early modern moment where one order gives way to another, showing how great shifts creep along quietly until they arrive with a jolt that cannot be ignored [1]. The story sits at the seam where an older feudal world dissolves into an emerging capitalist logic, a process dramatized through the enclosing of common fields and the redefining of villagers from people bound to a place into workers tethered to someone else’s profit [1]. It is not a playful introduction to social theory, and it does not make academic concepts feel breezy. Instead it renders them in touchable images and unruly bodies, making the idea of primitive accumulation feel material and often coarse, even when the pacing can feel stretched to the edge of patience [1].
What makes these ideas thrum on the screen is the way the camera drinks in the land and its textures. Sean Price Williams shoots on saturated sixteen millimeter, and that grain pulls viewers into damp soil, stubborn snails, the shimmer of tall grass in late summer light, and the hazy warmth of a day sliding into evening [1]. The frames are scraped at the edges, as if the land itself were pressing against the picture, and the film lingers on ordinary indulgences that belong to a particular place and season. There is food shared, drink poured, smoke curling, bodies finding pleasure, and hands going still to take in a rose gold sky before darkness erases color, a rhythm of living that makes the threat of being pushed out feel like a theft of breath itself [1]. Those sensual moments are set against the narrowing channels of movement that come with enclosure and the ruthless tidiness of a system that turns the living world into parcels and returns [1].
Some viewers have tried to fold the film into the idea of folk horror because it bristles with old customs and a sense that beliefs older than the church still have a hold on local rituals like a harvest bonfire, and because there is a low angled wooziness that unsettles the gaze [1]. But calling it horror misses what the movie is working through. Folk horror often leans into what comes back from beneath, what refuses to stay buried. This story is concerned with how those older practices and communal instincts are driven down and contained to begin with, how suppression is made, codified, and then rebranded as order [1]. The fear here is not the return of a banished force. It is the hollowing out of a way of life by rules that redefine belonging and strip a community of shared ground with signatures, lines on paper, and the violence that enforces them [1].
The film acknowledges the use of misogynist violence as a tool of discipline during the period that saw witch panics set the terms for what women could be, drawing from the thinking that Silvia Federici laid out in her work on how the birth of capitalist relations and the persecution of women were linked in practice [1]. This thread comes into focus through the figure of Mistress Beldam, a woman who moves at the margins of the village and the narrative, untamed by relations that would fix her in place [1]. She remains inscrutable, bracing, and arguably not necessary for the plot in a strict sense, especially since the story already has an outsider who watches and listens from the side. Yet her presence crystallizes the larger idea that what cannot be contained must be pushed out or punished, and that the language of accusation becomes a technology of order [1].
Walter Thirsk, played with alert restraint by Caleb Landry Jones, is the witness who ties the threads together. He loves the soil beneath his feet but was not born in this patch of earth, arriving years earlier in the company of Charles Kent, the local administrator whose decency does not keep pace with his passivity [1]. Walter used to serve Charles directly, then married a woman from the village and dug into the work alongside neighbors who do not entirely trust him but do not reject him either [1]. After his wife’s death he drifts into a tender and half public companionship with a widow named Kitty, a relationship that feels less like scandal than like a shared understanding of how loneliness pushes people toward warmth [1].
Walter’s position between the manor and the village gives him a vantage point and a function. He runs messages, reads moods, and explains one side to the other, translating gestures and meanings that might otherwise collide [1]. That liminal stance becomes more complicated when a visitor arrives. Charles hires a mapmaker named Phillip Earle, called Mr Quill, to draw the land and write names for its features, a task Phillip approaches as craft and calling [1]. He considers himself an artist and wants the lines to be true, the labels precise, the textures honored. Yet making a map is never only a matter of care. Drawing a line becomes an act that determines where someone can go, who is allowed to cross, and what counts as a boundary that can be guarded by men with sticks and writs [1].
A joke early on suggests naming a patch of ground the turd and turf, a crude bit of humor that says something about how naming can be both affectionate and absurd, and how the very act of pinning language to a place can shift relations to it [1]. Naming turns to dividing, and dividing becomes fencing, and fencing becomes exclusion, and then profit rides in behind those barriers like an inevitable rider [1]. Even the impatience that some viewers feel with the film’s unhurried cadence mirrors the modern habit of counting minutes like coins, a habit the villagers have not yet absorbed and that the movie refuses to flatter [1]. Time in this world is circular and seasonal, not a straight road that must be sped down, which can make sequences feel extended when watched through contemporary eyes but is true to the life it depicts [1].
Against this slow, attentive mood stands Edmund Jordan, a cousin by marriage who arrives with paperwork and entitlement and the clarity of a man who knows exactly how to bend a situation to his advantage [1]. He is framed with little ambiguity as a figure who pursues private gain without a glance toward the people whose lives he will uproot, and the performance plays him as coldly certain with a charm that curdles at the edges [2]. Around him the other characters have hope and decency that are not matched by perspective, unable to see how their small choices fit into an unfolding that no single hand can stop. Charles says at one point that everything is going and he does not know how to halt the motion, a remark that contains both grief and resignation, and the movie answers by recording the drift with care and craft rather than offering a triumph that history did not allow [1].
The cinematic language makes these ideas breathe. Williams’s sixteen millimeter images show toil and tenderness in the same frame, with close shots of hands reaping, wool pulled from a ram, and bodies leaning into labor that has its own dignity even as it is haunted by what is coming [2]. The camera sometimes tilts low and seems to float, not to disorient for its own sake but to nudge the viewer into a perspective that feels closer to the ground and to the perspective of people who navigate by ditch, hedgerow, and tree rather than abstract coordinates [3]. At times the compositions call to mind painted scenes full of tiny activities and flat depth, a busy tapestry of village life, while night gatherings bring an unruly glow that critics associate with folk horror, though here the effect points toward a thinning membrane between older communal rituals and a new reality that will file them down [3].
The plot unfolds with arrivals that change the temperature of the place. Mr Quill unsettles the villagers not because he is cruel but because his task will fix their home to a page and, in doing so, make it easier to own and subdivide [2]. He collects plants, presses them between sheets, and tells Walter that giving names is a way to know, an idea that feels tender and ominous in the same breath [2]. The second arrival is far less gentle. Master Jordan steps in, claims control through avenues that are lawful but predatory, and begins to shape the land toward pasture and profit just as people prepare to glean from fields that had always provided something back to them at the end of harvest [2]. With him come men who enforce new rules by humiliation and assault, violence directed at women that lays bare the cruelty beneath the rhetoric of improvement [2].
The film does not pound on a thesis. It braids vignettes so the feeling of slow unraveling accumulates. A barn burns and blame lands on strangers. The village shaves the head of a woman outsider and locks up her companions, a flash of petty authoritarianism that mirrors the larger force pressing in from the manor [4]. Walter’s efforts to mediate falter as suspicion grows, and the cartographer becomes a convenient target when fear needs a face [5]. The rituals that once knit the community together begin to feel fragile and defensive, less expressions of shared meaning and more last shelters against a storm no one can disperse [5]. The gentle administrator watches events slip past his grasp, and his kindness proves no match for calculation backed by law and threat [5].
The performances hold this fabric together. Jones gives Walter a watchful quiet that lets small expressions do the talking. Harry Melling’s Charles is earnest and painfully out of step with the moment’s demands, as if goodness without resolve were a kind of vanity [4]. Arinzé Kene’s Mr Quill brings pride in craft and a bright curiosity that feel admirable even as the consequences of his work grow darker around him, which sharpens the tragedy at the center of the story [4]. The imagery takes its time and rewards patience with scenes that feel carved out of an era rather than staged as bullet points on a timeline, making the place breathe with weather, mud, and fragile joy [6].
If the film resists easy pleasure, it does so to insist on the stakes of what is lost when communal life is pried apart. It mourns without sentimentality and refuses to romanticize suffering, keeping its gaze on how people make do, how they share, how they laugh and flirt and sing even as an impersonal logic wraps itself around their days [3]. It is not kind to the force that pushes them out, nor does it theatricalize that force into a monster. Instead it presents a banal and relentless sorting of land and bodies that will feel familiar to anyone who has seen a neighborhood reshaped by capital and language that calls displacement improvement [7]. In the end the act that remains possible is witness. The film looks at a moment when choices felt both small and fateful and records it with a sensuous clarity that refuses either despair or false consolation [1].
Harvest is at once intimate and expansive, anchored in a single village yet speaking to a long arc of transformation that defined the modern world. Its *core* concerns are concrete rather than abstract, showing how marking a line on a page becomes a fence on the ground, how a seasonal rhythm becomes a clock, and how a community becomes a labor force [2]. Its *images* make the viewer feel the land as something more than backdrop, a partner in living that cannot be replaced with sums in a ledger [1]. And its *ending* offers no solution, only the insistence that to write down what happened and how it felt is not to be passive but to resist a second erasure, the one that comes when stories vanish according to the convenience of power [1].
Sources
[1] Harvest movie review & film summary (2025) | Roger Ebert https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/harvest-horror-film-review-2025
[2] Harvest – Archive – Reverse Shot https://reverseshot.org/archive/entry/3255/harvest
[3] Harvest review: paradise lost | Sight and Sound – BFI https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/reviews/harvest-sensuous-surreal-anti-capitalist-allegory
[4] Harvest review – remarkably compelling work | Little White Lies https://lwlies.com/reviews/harvest
[5] “Harvest” Review: A Paradise Lost (MUBI) – Micropsia https://www.micropsiacine.com/2025/08/harvest-review-a-paradise-lost/
[6] Movie Review (NYFF 2024): ‘Harvest’ is a Visual Feast, … https://insessionfilm.com/movie-review-nyff-2024-harvest/
[7] ‘Harvest’ Review: Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Brawny, Brutal Rural Fable https://variety.com/2024/film/reviews/harvest-review-1236127858/
[8] Harvest by Athina Rachel Tsangari // Drama // Directors Notes https://directorsnotes.com/2025/07/17/athina-rachel-tsangari-harvest/
[9] ‘Harvest’ Review: When the Land Was Home – The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/movies/harvest-review.html
[10] Sydney Film Festival Interview: Reaping the Harvest with Athina … https://www.thecurb.com.au/sydney-film-festival-interview-reaping-the-harvest-with-athina-rachel-tsangari/
[11] A Disorganised Plethora Of Ideas – Harvest (Film Review) https://filmhounds.co.uk/2025/07/harvest-film-review/
[12] Harvest (2024) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13610344/
