Review: Harvest, Glasgow Film Festival, Barry Didcock, Three stars

A leading light in the so-called Greek Weird Wave, a movement centred on Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos, Athina Rachel Tsangari has already made three critically-acclaimed films in her homeland, the most recent of which examined toxic masculinity. But Harvest, an adaptation of Jim Crace’s Booker shortlisted novel, is very much a step up in scale and ambition.

It has already played at the Venice and London film festivals where it was reviewed variously as a surreal Scottish Western, a mediaeval folk horror, and a 17th century period drama. In truth, it’s not clear which description is correct. Most likely, none is.

Crace, one of our most gifted novelists, is fond of the mythical and the allegorical, so maybe we should just leave it at that – or, no less valid, imagine a post-apocalyptic setting instead, with events taking place centuries into a low-tech agrarian future where the same old class divisions and malign capitalist impulses are becoming apparent.

Scottish it certainly is, though. The fact is made explicit in the........

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