what’s up joners! I just saw Harvest at sfff and it was even better than I had ever expected. Like this is my new favorite movie ever. Along with getting to watch the movie, there was a qna with Athina Rachel Tsangari, and I got to meet her afterwards to tell her how much I loved it.
the movie is more faithful to the book than I expected, although a lot of the deviations were expected if you’ve watched any of Athinas other works. It opens with a scene of supposedly shroom-tripping Walter(Caleb) running around the field, kissing a snail, biting off a chunk of bark, fingering a hole in a tree, and stripping and swimming in a lake with a quite frankly INSANE booty shot. Like I’m talking nearly hole-bearing ass shot. Then, there is a fire in the village and the story kicks off from there. Everybody panics around for a while, putting out the fire(and saving master kent(Harry melling)s horse Willowjack. Walt injures his hand in the midst of it. Kitty(rosy mcewen), a widow and the town fabrics person, helps Walt tend to his wounds the next day, and shes in love w him but he doesn’t really reciprocate.
eventually we reach harvest day, and Walt has to sit out because his burnt hand has rendered him unhelpful. So he assists the mapmaker Earl, who they called Quill(Arinze kenze) on mapping the area. They become besties and Walt ends up helping quill with making his paper. Things seem fine until 3 outsiders invade the village and everyone goes bonkers. The two men, one old and one younger, are hung in the pillory for 7 days while the woman is restrained while Kitty cuts off all of her hair, like shearing a sheep. They let her go afterwards, and some of the towns men and the kids grab locks of her hair to play with. Then comes the harvest party, where everyone dances around wearing kind of creepy masks while the men in the pillory watch.
Afterwards they drink their beer and Master Kent announces that the town will no longer be farming wheat, but shifting focus to shearing sheep. Walt isn’t into that idea and leaves to go pee on the dirt and then pick up that dirt and squish it in his hands(a little weird but ok).
Walt sees the old man on the pillory struggling because he is too short, so he must stand on his toes to not strangle himself. Walt goes to bring him a stone to stand on, while the pillory men berate him.(they were calling him a little pig fucker w a spoon in his ass??? It made me laugh) Turns out Walt couldn’t bring him the stone bcus of his boo-boo hand so he says he will get help in the morning, to which the men just bully him more.
morning comes, and nobody wants to help Walt with that stone because the men are still hurling insults at everybody now so they just kind of forget abt it. We learn that Walt has left his pigs, George and Gorge, roam around town.
the village has an annual tradition of choosing the “gleaning queen”, basically a beauty competition between the older girls of the town. Master Kent has Quill choose the queen, and everybody is a bit disappointed when he chose the young child. This part was one of my favorites in the book, and I think the book shows it better, but the movie interpreted it well. It is apparent that the village does not like Quill, because he is an outsider. This leads them to eventually start distrusting Walt, because he becomes his assistant.
this night, Walt’s pigs are still left out and begin harassing the pillory men because of the rotten apples the villagers had thrown at them(I think). The pig starts biting and eating the old man’s leg and he is found dead in the morning. The village freaks out a bit and it’s pretty gross, but they take him out and try to cover up his body. During this, Master Jordan(Frank Dillane) and his crew arrive on horses and see the corpse. He doesn’t rlly gaf about that and instead cares more about capitalism and profits. We find out that Master Jordan is Master Kent’s cousin, and that Jordan is the one who sent quill to make the map and who is making Kent’s village turn to sheep farmers. Master Kent has no backbone.
Walt and quill bond some more, Walt tells quill all of the names for things around the village, and quill suggests better sounding names. Walt tells him about all of the plants including the beloved shrooms. Later that night, we get a sex scene of kitty trying to ride Walt, but it’s obvious that he is not into it so after sitting on his thing for a minute she decides to get up and walk around the town during the night. She sees the outsider woman, who the town calls mistress beldam. She gets kind of scared and leaves and we see beldam skinny dip in the lake to wash blood off of herself(much more gracefully than Walt)
in the morning, kitty gives Walt a cute new shirt she made him, and helps him put it on but is interrupted by a townswomen who tells her that willowjack has died. the whole town comes out to see master Kent and his beloved horse laying together in the stall. The horse was killed by being stabbed in the head. Walt closes the door and tells everyone to leave Kent alone. Unfortunately, Master Jordan comes back and also doesn’t really care that the horse died. The town has a little funeralish thing for the old guy and the horse. Everybody is kind of off put due to the fact that no one knows who killed the horse and the fact that so many bad things have been happening. Kent and Jordan have walt help them tear through every cottage to see if they could find who did it, and now the town dislikes Walt even more. Walt and quill work on mapmaking in the manor as well. Walt tells quill that he doesn’t really like his maps, because “they flatten us”, and their relationship is a bit damaged.
Jordan proposes to the town his plan of having them become sheep farmers to produce profit. Someone asks him how they will stay alive because they make wheat to eat as bread, and Jordan doesn’t really have an answer to that. Sheep farming becomes the villages end choice when Jordan traps kitty and her friend, as well as the young gleaning queen in Kent’s Manor. The whole town is furious at Jordan for stealing their women. Some guy from Jordan’s town starts taunting the gleaning queen’s parents, and the town starts beating him up. Walt, who was just chilling nearby accidentally gets kicked and punched by proxy. This was another one of my favorite scenes in the book, and it worked well on film. They slash a Glasgow smile onto the man and the mother cuts his tongue off.
Now nighttime, mistress beldam finds quill out in the field and fights with him until he is on the ground and she is straddling his face. She starts peeing on his face until he litrally drowns(this does not happen in the book!!!)
Meanwhile, in the manor Jordan is chilling with the gleaning queen while kitty and her friend are trapped in a room. They come to the realization that they will be stuck there, and Walt will not save them. But late in the night, they see mistress beldam who has stolen a horse for them outside of their window. They jump out the window and escape the village on the horse while thanking the mysterious beldam. In the morning, Walt wakes up and finds that the whole village is migrating. They believe they have no other choice. Walt feels very loyal to this land, despite not being born into it(he came in as master Kent’s assistant, and married into it with his late beekeeper wife cecily).
Earlier in the film there is a scene where the children of the village get their heads thrown against the boundary stone to make them remember where they belong, and to never cross the boundary. It was kind of funny and people in the theatre started laughing due to how jarring it was to see. Despite that, the villagers still leave, and Walt goes to Kent’s manor. Kent and Jordan tell him that he is now in charge of the village because he will be the only one there. Kent gives him the keys, and they tell Walt to let the man out of the pillory in a few days. Then they leave, and Walt is all alone.
Walt decides to traverse the land a bit and finds some shrooms to which he eats a lot. We then get a cool little trip scene where the film turns red, and we see a herd of sheep that seem confused on which way to go. Once Walt stops tripping that hard he goes and releases the man from the pillory, and tells him to scrounge through the village cottages and take whatever he wants. The pillory man and mistress beldam are seen very happy carrying a bunch of stuff from the village out later on, and now Walt is truly alone. He brings himself to the boundary stone and thunks his own head against it, and then the credits roll.
yeah I just explained what happened in the whole movie, albeit some things may be out of place or forgotten already, but it was kind of a long movie with a lot of details. Despite its length, it was never boring or dreadful, partially due to the beauty of the cinematography.
Caleb got 2 mentions in the credits, one for playing Walt, and another for being a part of the “harvest family band”, which was in charge of most of the music(which was pretty good). Katya Zvereva got a credit as “pig mask maker”(the mask Caleb wears) which was pretty cool. The film really transports you somewhere else, and it’s equally tragic and hilarious.
if you guys have any questions about it, please!!! Ask away, and I’ll try to answer to the best of my abilities. I really love this movie and hope I can find a way to see it again soon.
And, for those of you that made it this far, I asked athina about a US release, and she said that hopefully it can get a theatrical release in September. Which is a while, but the digital release for Uk, eu, and Latin America is early August. I really do recommend this movie.
