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The Guardian
26-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I call it a nihilist western': director Athina Rachel Tsangari on her trippy folk horror Harvest
A hand emerges from sheaves of wheat waving in the wind. Then we see a face, trying to eat moss on a log, and a tongue searching for liquid in rocks. When Caleb Landry Jones (Dogman, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) fully emerges, his blue cape flows like a toga or a Japanese courtier's cape, close mics capturing every tiny sound – and then exhilarating Romanian prog rock kicks in. Harvest has been described as a folk horror film – one that has sharply divided the critics – but its trippy, haunting opening, inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's unfinished book Reveries of the Solitary Walker, introduces something far stranger than that. It's been a 'very personal film' for its genre-hopping Greek new wave director Athina Rachel Tsangari, whose previous work includes an avant garde commentary on Greek society (Attenberg), a twisted male friendship comedy (Chevalier) and a BBC Two series about a throuple (Trigonometry). Today, the 59-year-old is presenting a retrospective of her movies at the New Horizons film festival in Poland, where Attenberg won best film in 2011. 'It's full of people in their 20s,' she says, smiling. 'Really hardcore film buffs, who come for 10 days and watch like five, six films a day.' Harvest was a project brought to her by Joslyn Barnes, who was Oscar-nominated this year for the screenplay for US reform school drama Nickel Boys. 'She had a script and a mood board already, so there was a world there. I just needed to figure out how and if I fitted in.' Adapted from Jim Crace's 2013 Man Booker prize-nominated novel of the same name, Harvest tells the story of the descent and destruction of a village over seven days. The cast is made up of local people from Oban in Scotland, where Harvest was filmed, and outsiders slowly enter the fray: two unnamed men who get put into stocks, a woman who is suspected of being a witch (Trigonometry's Thalissa Teixeira), and Quill (Arinzé Kene), a map-maker tasked with charting the land. Tsangari 'completely identified' with two of the lead characters, she says: Walter Thirsk (played by Landry Jones) and Quill. Why? '[Walter is] such a tragic, tragic character. You know, someone who does not really belong and he never will.' And Quill? 'Because he's the artist – his job is to draw and describe and name things. I suppose I was fearing that in the end. As an artist, you are going to be complicit with some kind of system that's going to try to co-opt you, devour you, or employ you to its service.' Two Harry Potter alumni also put in haunting appearances: Harry Melling is the town's weak-willed mayor and Frank Dillane, as his city cousin, arrives with a terrifying Witchfinder General vibe, as well as tall hat. Keen to preserve the novel's peculiar mood, Tsangari turned to her 'treasure trove' of favourite films, she says, including Peter Watkins' 2000 docudrama La Commune (Paris, 1871) and wayward 70s westerns McCabe and Mrs Miller and The Missouri Breaks. She doesn't buy that Harvest is a folk horror. 'It's more pastoral … yes, there is paganism in it, but I've called it a nihilist western.' The passivity of its characters as dread encroaches has a contemporary power, while Crace's setting of the story in an unspecified era – albeit with echoes of the Highland Clearances – adds to its allegorical sheen. 'The last thing I wanted to do was locate it and lodge it in a specific time,' Tsangari says. 'Especially since the dissolution of communities, and the bordering up of land, the ghettoes, are happening literally everywhere now.' This is Tsangari's first full-length film as a director in nearly a decade. Greek cinema is in a dire state, she says. 'There is not enough support by our government, especially after the big exodus Greek cinema has had in this century.' She often worked with Yorgos Lanthimos before he found Hollywood success with The Lobster and The Favourite (she co-produced his Greek-language films Dogtooth and Alps), but says the problems have been longstanding, citing one man as Greek cinema's saviour. '[Producer] Christos V Konstantakopoulos single-handedly financed half of the Greek new wave films. That's actually a fact.' She is now part of Visibility: Zero, a campaign launched with an open letter from nearly 2,000 signatories in June, demanding institutional reform within the Greek arts. Or as Tsangari puts it: 'It's a revolt against the total disregard for the Greek cinema community by our state.' Part of the problem is a cash rebate programme for non-Greek film-makers working in the country, she explains, that has prioritised movies with bigger budgets and squeezed indie productions. 'It's an issue happening more and more in Europe – the whole industry is getting overextended, and then it becomes prohibitive for our very modest films to be made. It's also becoming more and more difficult to make films in my own language.' A few days after we speak, 176 international actors, directors and producers, including Juliette Binoche and Willem Dafoe, signed a letter demanding that the Culture Ministry and the Hellenic Film and Audiovisual Center – Creative Greece take immediate action. But back to Harvest, loved by some critics and hated by others. I ask if Tsangari likes making films that produce extreme reactions. 'I'm not the right person to respond to this,' she says. She doesn't read reviews, she adds, but admits to reading the Guardian's chief film critic Peter Bradshaw's negative take. 'It was the first one … a bit traumatic'. Now she is focusing on travelling, she says, to present the film 'out in the world'. She is much happier talking about the film's epic sound design. The fabulous opening track, by Romanian experimental one-man band Rodion GA, was made on cassette during the culturally punitive rule of Ceaușescu; she tells me excitedly that she got the masters from bandleader Rodion Roșca's daughter. She also loved building up a Harvest Family Band, which included Landry Jones (who is also a musician) and experimental recorder player Laura Cannell, with support from ethnomusicologist Gary West and Gaelic musicians Sarah and Anna Garvin. Sound of Metal's award-winning composer Nicolas Becker and sound engineer David Bowtle-McMillan also bolstered the film's extreme sensory intensity, the latter often using 20 mics at one time, 'buried in the mud, when it was raining, like a Zen Buddha, as if he was mixing jazz,' Tsangari says with a laugh. Whatever your take on it, Harvest is a film that envelops you in its noise, that lingers, that you can't extract yourself from, I say. Tsangari smiles, perhaps with relief. 'That is literally music to my ears!' Harvest is in cinemas on 25 July and on Mubi from 8 August.
The Guardian
25-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I call it a nihilist western': director Athina Rachel Tsangari on her trippy folk horror Harvest
A hand emerges from sheaves of wheat waving in the wind. Then we see a face, trying to eat moss on a log, and a tongue searching for liquid in rocks. When Caleb Landry Jones (Dogman, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) fully emerges, his blue cape flows like a toga or a Japanese courtier's cape, close mics capturing every tiny sound – and then exhilarating Romanian prog rock kicks in. Harvest has been described as a folk horror film – one that has sharply divided the critics – but its trippy, haunting opening, inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's unfinished book Reveries of the Solitary Walker, introduces something far stranger than that. It's been a 'very personal film' for its genre-hopping Greek new wave director Athina Rachel Tsangari, whose previous work includes an avant garde commentary on Greek society (Attenberg), a twisted male friendship comedy (Chevalier) and a BBC Two series about a throuple (Trigonometry). Today, the 59-year-old is presenting a retrospective of her movies at the New Horizons film festival in Poland, where Attenberg won best film in 2011. 'It's full of people in their 20s,' she says, smiling. 'Really hardcore film buffs, who come for 10 days and watch like five, six films a day.' Harvest was a project brought to her by Joslyn Barnes, who was Oscar-nominated this year for the screenplay for US reform school drama Nickel Boys. 'She had a script and a mood board already, so there was a world there. I just needed to figure out how and if I fitted in.' Adapted from Jim Crace's 2013 Man Booker prize-nominated novel of the same name, Harvest tells the story of the descent and destruction of a village over seven days. The cast is made up of local people from Oban in Scotland, where Harvest was filmed, and outsiders slowly enter the fray: two unnamed men who get put into stocks, a woman who is suspected of being a witch (Trigonometry's Thalissa Teixeira), and Quill (Arinzé Kene), a map-maker tasked with charting the land. Tsangari 'completely identified' with two of the lead characters, she says: Walter Thirsk (played by Landry Jones) and Quill. Why? '[Walter is] such a tragic, tragic character. You know, someone who does not really belong and he never will.' And Quill? 'Because he's the artist – his job is to draw and describe and name things. I suppose I was fearing that in the end. As an artist, you are going to be complicit with some kind of system that's going to try to co-opt you, devour you, or employ you to its service.' Two Harry Potter alumni also put in haunting appearances: Harry Melling is the town's weak-willed mayor and Frank Dillane, as his city cousin, arrives with a terrifying Witchfinder General vibe, as well as tall hat. Keen to preserve the novel's peculiar mood, Tsangari turned to her 'treasure trove' of favourite films, she says, including Peter Watkins' 2000 docudrama La Commune (Paris, 1871) and wayward 70s westerns McCabe and Mrs Miller and The Missouri Breaks. She doesn't buy that Harvest is a folk horror. 'It's more pastoral … yes, there is paganism in it, but I've called it a nihilist western.' The passivity of its characters as dread encroaches has a contemporary power, while Crace's setting of the story in an unspecified era – albeit with echoes of the Highland Clearances – adds to its allegorical sheen. 'The last thing I wanted to do was locate it and lodge it in a specific time,' Tsangari says. 'Especially since the dissolution of communities, and the bordering up of land, the ghettoes, are happening literally everywhere now.' This is Tsangari's first full-length film as a director in nearly a decade. Greek cinema is in a dire state, she says. 'There is not enough support by our government, especially after the big exodus Greek cinema has had in this century.' She often worked with Yorgos Lanthimos before he found Hollywood success with The Lobster and The Favourite (she co-produced his Greek-language films Dogtooth and Alps), but says the problems have been longstanding, citing one man as Greek cinema's saviour. '[Producer] Christos V Konstantakopoulos single-handedly financed half of the Greek new wave films. That's actually a fact.' She is now part of Visibility: Zero, a campaign launched with an open letter from nearly 2,000 signatories in June, demanding institutional reform within the Greek arts. Or as Tsangari puts it: 'It's a revolt against the total disregard for the Greek cinema community by our state.' Part of the problem is a cash rebate programme for non-Greek film-makers working in the country, she explains, that has prioritised movies with bigger budgets and squeezed indie productions. 'It's an issue happening more and more in Europe – the whole industry is getting overextended, and then it becomes prohibitive for our very modest films to be made. It's also becoming more and more difficult to make films in my own language.' A few days after we speak, 176 international actors, directors and producers, including Juliette Binoche and Willem Dafoe, signed a letter demanding that the Culture Ministry and the Hellenic Film and Audiovisual Center – Creative Greece take immediate action. But back to Harvest, loved by some critics and hated by others. I ask if Tsangari likes making films that produce extreme reactions. 'I'm not the right person to respond to this,' she says. She doesn't read reviews, she adds, but admits to reading the Guardian's chief film critic Peter Bradshaw's negative take. 'It was the first one … a bit traumatic'. Now she is focusing on travelling, she says, to present the film 'out in the world'. She is much happier talking about the film's epic sound design. The fabulous opening track, by Romanian experimental one-man band Rodion GA, was made on cassette during the culturally punitive rule of Ceaușescu; she tells me excitedly that she got the masters from bandleader Rodion Roșca's daughter. She also loved building up a Harvest Family Band, which included Landry Jones (who is also a musician) and experimental recorder player Laura Cannell, with support from ethnomusicologist Gary West and Gaelic musicians Sarah and Anna Garvin. Sound of Metal's award-winning composer Nicolas Becker and sound engineer David Bowtle-McMillan also bolstered the film's extreme sensory intensity, the latter often using 20 mics at one time, 'buried in the mud, when it was raining, like a Zen Buddha, as if he was mixing jazz,' Tsangari says with a laugh. Whatever your take on it, Harvest is a film that envelops you in its noise, that lingers, that you can't extract yourself from, I say. Tsangari smiles, perhaps with relief. 'That is literally music to my ears!' Harvest is in cinemas on 25 July.
Irish Times
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Harvest review: Trippy medieval parable where allegory overpowers the drama
Harvest Harvest Director : Athina Rachel Tsangari Cert : 18 Genre : Folklore Starring : Caleb Landry Jones, Harry Melling, Rosy McEwen, Arinzé Kene, Thalissa Teixeira, Frank Dillane Running Time : 2 hrs 11 mins Athina Rachel Tsangari, sometime Yorgos Lanthimos collaborator and leading light of the Greek Weird Wave, returns to features following a nine-year hiatus. Harvest, her first English-language film, is a trippy medieval parable drawn from Jim Crace's novel of the same name. Although imbued with the same off‑kilter humour that powered Attenberg and Chevalier to international success, here Tsangari pursues an angular, folkloric register, situating her story in an unnamed Scottish border hamlet confronted by enclosure, cartographic bureaucracy and outsiders blamed for an unexplained blaze. Walter Thirsk, portrayed by Caleb Landry Jones with fraught fragility, occupies the nebulous space between peasantry and gentry; childhood ties bind him to benevolent yet ineffectual landlord Master Kent ( Harry Melling ). Their complicated kinship – both recent widowers – grants the picture its most persuasive emotional anchor. Around them swirl suspicious villagers, mysterious wanderers and the comparatively worldly map‑maker Earle (Arinzé Kene), whose parchment lines foreshadow dispossession. The arrival of Kent's ambitious cousin Jordan (Frank Dillane) hastens the transformation of fields into profitable pasture, pushing the settlement toward further fracture. READ MORE Cinematographer Sean Price Williams lenses mud, mist and ember skies with handsome texture – 16mm grain and flares showing – producing tableaux that recall Bruegel as much as Gaspar Noé. Tsangari's taste for ritual detail – a buttercup dabbed across a child's cheek before the Gleaning Queen selection, the burning of a corn dolly – creates searing imagery. Unhappily, the film's allegorical ambitions overpower its drama. Often-hapless characters frequently stand for positions rather than pulse with personality or motive, slowing momentum across an already‑stretched running time. When violence finally erupts – a humiliating shaving, a ghastly pillory interlude – the shock registers, but the preceding drift lessens the impact. Landry Jones and several co-stars, capable of real and feral unpredictability, are restrained by dialogue that sounds stock. There's plenty to admire – the earthy sound design, inventive point‑of‑view shifts, flashes of sly humour – while simultaneously yearning for the vivacity that enlivened the director's earlier work. Like the village it depicts, the film is meticulously crafted yet oddly two-dimensional: a map, not a place.
Geek Tyrant
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
Trailer for the Surreal Folk Horror Film HARVEST Starring Caleb Landry Jones — GeekTyrant
This is the trailer for 'a spellbinding and thrillingly distinctive period piece' titled Harvest , which is a surreal folk horror tale starring Caleb Landry Jones ( Get Out ). It looks like a pretty wild cult movie. In the film, 'Over seven hallucinatory days, a village with no name, in an undefined time and place, disappears. Townsman-turned-farmer Walter Thirsk and befuddled lord of the manor Charles Kent are childhood friends about to face an invasion from the outside world: the trauma of modernity. The movie is directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari ( Attenberg ) from a script she co-wrote with Joslyn Barnes ( Nickel Boys ), based on Jim Crace's 2013 novel of the same name. The movie was shot on 16mm film by Sean Price Williams ( Good Time ), it also stars Harry Melling, Rosy McEwen, Arinzé Kene, Thalissa Teixeira, and Frank Dillane star. The movie still doesn't have US distribution, but it opens in theaters in Germany on May 22 and the UK, Ireland, Mexico, and Chile July 18 before streaming in the UK, Ireland, Latin America, and more on August 8th.
