Avis des critiques

Harvest is a film so tactile and so textured you can practically feel it through the screen, and indeed the frame itself flickers and lightly disintegrates around the edges, as though infused with the Highlands’ earthy detritus and fiery sunsets.

Tsangari’s film is punctuated by anxiety, violence, and absence, and in so doing evokes a sliver of time — between the feudal system and industrialization — in European history, one which has been since lost to privatization.

Despite its period trappings, “Harvest” comes across as a cautionary parable for our times as economic and political forces have displaced numerous communities and xenophobia still remains.

Between its teeming ensemble cast and impressively fetid period texture, Harvest represents a distinct leveling up of scope and scale for its creator; while thematically of a piece with its predecessors, it’s more classical in its structure, and also more explicitly left-correct as a critique... Tsangari balances her responsibilities as a sociological cartographer against the inherently playful sensibility that defines her practice, always for the better.

It oozes with ambiguity, but not the kind that is meant to send chills up spines, a la Robert Eggers’ The Witch or Goran Stolevski’s You Won’t Be Alone. Instead, it’s a work of enigmatic visual storytelling...

What we’re left with is a handsomely mounted production in which much of the filth feels stage-managed. The muck that the film requires, both spiritual and psychological, shouldn’t have its own dressing room.

Perhaps Harvest would have been more suited to a limited series format, one which could offer room for the fleshing-out of characters and building of suspense as revelations are uncovered. As a film, it feels long-winded to sit through at times, especially when it fails to justify liberties taken from the book’s original narrative.

[O]verall it just feels like Tsangari’s film is not quite the sum of its parts, stumbling a little with its pacing and general feeling of confusion, even if that confusion was exactly the point.

Tsangari effectively created a surreal atmosphere surrounding the events as they escalate out of control. There’s a trance-like quality to the way things look and how the story unfolds that recalls Aronofsky’s Mother!.

Harvest is a film that is more fascinating than it is intelligible, in which the second half is significantly more engaging than the first.

Harvest is Greek auteur Athina Rachel Tsangari‘s third feature narrative, and, unfortunately, also her least effective. Described as the director’s take on the Western genre which aims to depict “the trauma of modernity,” it instead plays like a glacially paced bit of folk horror as concerns an unnamed time and place where an obscure farming community has been deemed an obsolete outpost to its money hungry landowners.

Sadly, it’s a tiresome folk non-horror set in a quaintly imagined medieval village on the Scots-Mummerset border with plenty of golden-hour landscape shots and dreamy insect closeups: a pastiche bucolic non-place with rural-effect activities.