Rating: NR | Runtime: 133 minutes
Release Date: July 18th, 2025 (UK) / August 8th, 2005 (USA)
Studio: MUBI
Director(s): Athina Rachel Tsangari
Writer(s): Joslyn Barnes and Athina Rachel Tsangari / Jim Crace (book)

He means to throw a halter around our lives.

Better a harvest than a slaughter as commerce and modernity enters the bucolic countryside commune that adopted Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones) amongst its ranks. Because progress is coming to make profits more valuable than lives. Neither Thirsk, his best friend and steward of the land (Harry Melling’s Charles Kent), or the inhabitants calling it home for generations can stem the tide. For some it might just be easier to just leave and start anew.

Athina Rachel Tsangari’s film is a fascinating one as it introduces the myriad fractured pieces of civilization at a moment of uncontrollable change in Scotland during the Middle Ages. The utopian dream of kinship fostered by Kent’s kind yet cowardly “owner.” The restless struggle of farmers preparing for the coming winter. Strangers blown in to threaten a tenuous normalcy by their differences in appearance and nature. And heartless enemies demanding allegiance.

Fire, violence, and cruelty abound as these elements collide to force each party to look inward and take stock of their strength and loyalty amidst the uncertainty of their survival. And it all unfolds upon the shoulders of a widower imprisoned by his lost love to remain true to the land in which she’s buried. Land he knows intrinsically despite being a visitor himself. Land that owns his soul regardless of who arrives next to claim ownership over it.

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Caleb Landry Jones in HARVEST; courtesy of MUBI.