This article appeared in the October 1, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Harvest (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2024)

In her superlative sophomore feature Attenberg (2010), Athina Rachel Tsangari pondered the mysteries of the human mammal through the story of a young woman who is so mesmerized by wildlife documentaries that she begins to mimic the animals. Moving forward, the Greek filmmaker continued to explore Darwinian metaphysics—and to expand her cryptozoological menagerie—via a stunning, dance-themed short film (2012’s The Capsule); an absurdist nautical comedy (2015’s Chevalier); and a sexually explicit TV series (2020’s Trigonometry)—which featured, respectively, a cloister of chimerical novitiates, a flock of strutting male peacocks, and a beast with three backs. Her new film Harvest, adapted from a novel by Jim Crace, manifests as a fable about the perpetually endangered species of the scapegoat—a figure represented in the narrative by a group of outsiders who are persecuted by an isolated pastoral U.K. community in the distant past.

To paraphrase Billy Joel, the three drifters—two men (Gary Maitland and Noor Dillan-Night) and a woman (Thalissa Teixeira), the latter visibly dark-skinned—didn’t start the fire that burned down a stable in the center of town. As for the people who did (a gaggle of lads who were apparently stoned out of their minds), they’re keeping shtum—even the after resident lord, Master Kent (Harry Melling), impulsively sentences the interlopers to a series of humiliations, including stockading and head-shaving. Master Kent is an unprepossessing nebbish who inherited the estate from his late wife and governs in sympathy with her egalitarian spirit; by stopping short of capital punishment, he’s trying to show his constituents, in addition to himself, that he means well. Good intentions lead to you-know-where, however, and, skilfully subsuming artistic reference points from Arthur Miller to The Wicker Man (1973), Tsangari and her co-writer Joslyn Barnes finesse the social and economic upheavals of the Highland Clearances—during which cash-strapped landlords began evicting tenants with impunity—into an allegory about the paving of the Road to Hell.

Beneath its strategically languid melodrama and gorgeous, rough-hewn images of agrarian utopia (courtesy of cinematographer Sean Price Williams), Harvest scourges the psychology and mechanisms of ownership, whether it’s the earnest desire of a visiting mapmaker, Earle (Arinzé Kene), to proffer proper names for the landscape he’s sketching out one mile at a time (the fact that he’s Black doesn’t necessarily endear him to the locals) or the sneering entitlement of his deep-pocketed employer, Edmund Jordan (Frank Dillane). The latter is a would-be reformer whose condescending rhetoric and sleek, aristocratic wardrobe—topped off with a literal black hat—enshrine his villainy. For a hero, Tsangari gives us Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones), a farmer whose tendency to lapse into Malickian reveries about the beauty of the flora and fauna around him (often while high on magic mushrooms) hobbles his ability to act decisively on their behalf; his failures as a potential protector are emblematized by his burned-black right hand, which externalizes his weakness.

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. At the Toronto Film Festival, where I saw the film, the critical conversation on the ground about Harvest concerned whether its rueful account of paradise lost was somehow too obvious—and it’s true that the storytelling offers less in terms of surprise and more in the way of shock, which comes in bursts of brutal, impulsive violence. But tracing the arc of history is a grim business, and Tsangari balances her responsibilities as a sociological cartographer against the inherently playful sensibility that defines her practice, always for the better. No assessment of Harvest is complete without mentioning the running joke—worthy of Monty Python—that the area’s children are educated about the necessity of remaining close to home by having their heads bonked against rocks marking the extent of their shared territory. The gag gets at certain enduring, bludgeoning truths about pedagogy, religion, and capitalism: for any of the above to work, it’s crucial that people know their place.

The tender, vexing paradoxes of home—and the tension between upholding traditions and tearing them down—is central to Zambian-Welsh director Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, which is set in present-day Lusaka. In the startling and darkly hilarious opening scene, we meet thirtyish Shula (Susan Chardy) driving home from a costume party in a full Missy Elliott getup and glimpsing the supine body of her uncle Fred on the side of the highway. She looks Supa Dupa Fly, and he looks pretty much deceased. But somehow, the dead man commands more respect: Shula is instructed via cell phone by her father to keep watch over the body until the authorities arrive, at which point their extended family will begin the business of hosting an elaborate memorial service for the ostensibly dearly departed. Slowing time to a crawl as various mourners converge on the scene—including Shula’s cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela), whose tipsy good spirits don’t suggest grief so much as the desire to dance on her uncle’s grave—Nyoni conveys a palpable sense of impasse and entrapment. Seen through her car’s windshield glass darkly, our heroine is all dressed up with no place to go, a mournfully glamorous and tight-lipped avatar for a society stuck in neutral.

Suffice it to say that Fred—a hearty, convivial fellow who apparently kicked the bucket just steps aways from his favorite brothel—left behind plenty of skeletons in his closet. One way to look at On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is as a kind of horror movie in which the survivors of systematized and incestuous sexual assault stagger their way zombielike through the closed ranks of their family and friends. The more that Shula’s female relatives wail and gnash their teeth over the loss of the man, the more they seem to be sublimating their guilt, and Nyoni—whose gift for granular abstraction evokes (but does not crib from) the ambient psychodramas of Lucrecia Martel—delivers a torrent of aquatic imagery, a vision of a world submerged by crocodile tears. Meanwhile, the male characters are, to a man, infantile and needy, flailing around in a state of moral atrophy which demands that their women exist in a state of self-sufficient servility, mothers and daughters exalted and sacrificed upon the same disingenuous pedestal.

For all its formal sophistication, there is a sense in which On Becoming a Guinea Fowl has been engineered more conscientiously as a political statement than a work of drama; the didacticism begins—and, as it happens, ends—in the plangent symbolism of its title, which is derived from a vintage children’s television show whose lessons about avian behavior loom large in Shula’s subconscious. In this case, overstatement makes sense insofar as the story is literally about breaking a code of silence; the need to sound the alarm in the presence of predators is proposed as an ethical imperative among the characters, the filmmakers, and the audience. No less than Tsangari, Nyoni is interested in the relationship between the individual and the community, and also between human and animal behavior; in lieu of fight-or-flight dialectics, she imagines these impulses existing in a form of trilling harmony—of animism evolving into activism, a whisper raised to a scream.

Adam Nayman is a critic, lecturer, and author based in Toronto. He writes on film for The Ringer, The New Republic, and Sight and Sound.