«Harvest» Review: A Paradise Lost (MUBI)

A kind of paradise on Earth is what Walter Thirsk, the protagonist of Harvest, seems to inhabit when the film begins. He roams the meadows alone, climbs a tree—doing some slightly odd things up there—and then slips naked into a lake for a swim. What we don’t yet realize is that this may be the last peaceful moment of that chapter in his life: the calm before the storm, the beginning of the end. It’s this sense of lost paradise—or forgotten time—that Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari explores in her new feature. Known for Attenberg and Chevalier, and for producing the early works of Yorgos Lanthimos, Tsangari returns to filmmaking for the first time since 2015. Harvest marks both her comeback and her first film in English.

The time and place in which the story unfolds are deliberately ambiguous—neither the film nor the novel by Jim Crace on which it’s based makes them explicit. Accents and landscapes suggest a region in Scotland, but it could just as easily be anywhere else. That’s by design: the village Tsangari depicts is meant to stand in for many others, and the story itself resonates as a parable for our own time. Though initially confusing—one might think it’s a hippie commune—the setting soon reveals itself to be from the 17th century, just before land began to be bought, sold, and privatized.

Walter (Caleb Landry Jones) narrates the story of what happened to his small community. Right from the start, it’s clear that this paradise isn’t quite as serene as it seems. A mysterious fire burns down the barn of Master Kent (Harry Melling, miles away from his Harry Potter role), the villagers are too drunk to do much about it, and Walter injures and burns his hand trying to manage the chaos. The next morning, the locals discover two men and a woman near the lake, accuse them of arson, tie the men to a pillory—barely able to stand—and brutally cut the woman’s hair before banishing her from the village.

That’s only the beginning. Soon arrives Kent’s cousin Jordan (Frank Dillane of Fear the Walking Dead), the true heir to the land, who—unlike his more empathetic relative—clearly intends to convert the area from farmland to pasture for grazing. At the same time, a cartographer hired by Kent comes to map the land. Walter is fascinated by the maps (he hadn’t even realized how close they were to the sea), but they are also tools of measurement and control. From this point on, a series of miscommunications, hostilities, and false accusations unravel what little harmony remains in the village. Walter, increasingly sidelined, watches helplessly as the Eden he thought he knew slips through his fingers.

Tsangari presents this world in a richly immersive and lyrical style. Shot on 16mm by Sean Price Williams (known for his work with Alex Ross Perry and the Safdie brothers), the film captures the shadowy beauty of this indeterminate era like moving tableaux. The events unfold not with a clear narrative arc but in a cascade of seemingly disordered, chaotic episodes—like a week in which everything quietly, irrevocably changes. It’s a shift from one way of life to another, ushering in what we now call the Industrial Revolution.

Harvest is, more than anything, a film about the end of a certain epoch—one of communal, messy, and perhaps proto-socialist living—and the emergence of a new order in which land ownership, financial interest, and social division dominate. The anxieties that grow between villagers are clearly encouraged by the landowners, who manipulate local tensions—today’s equivalent might be anti-immigrant rhetoric—to provoke disorder and consolidate power. Even scientific progress, in the form of cartography, becomes a tool for dominance and social control.

Tsangari never delivers a didactic or overtly political message. Instead, she lays out a sequence of intertwined events that gradually erode a once-cooperative—if chaotic—community. In one scene, Walter tries to help the men in the pillory and is attacked by his own people, convinced he’s aiding outsiders. In another, the cartographer is blamed for something he didn’t do. All the while, a passive and confused Kent looks on as Jordan quietly sets about reshaping the village to fit his own vision.

Visually entrancing, Harvest can at times struggle to keep its narrative threads fully coherent. But Tsangari clearly favors sensory immersion and subjective experience over conventional storytelling or tidy political parable. And in this, she succeeds—crafting a haunting and poetic portrait of a fading world. In a final touch, over the end credits, Tsangari dedicates the film to her grandparents, “on whose farm there is now a highway.” It’s her most direct statement about the story she’s just told—of a strange, vanishing paradise and the quiet violence of its loss.