On demand: "Harvest"

Were you feeling generous, you might approach the so-called Greek Weird Wave as less a helpful marketing catch-all than a cinematic mutation of anthropology, some of its core texts being better observed and more insightful than others. Athena Rachel Tsangari has so far specialised in droll portraits of community: the girls behaving badly of 2010's Attenberg, the oceanbound manosphere (or ship of fools) of 2015's Chevalier, my favourite among that initial package of Greek exports. In Harvest, which sees Tsangari using Jim Crace's 2013 novel of the same name to guide her passage into English-speaking arthouse terrain, the filmmaker's gaze turns to another century and world entirely: an agrarian enclave in the British North of the Middle Ages, caught collapsing and disappearing before our very eyes. We join these hapless homesteaders just as their barn burns down, fuelling whispers that the coming harvest will be too weak to sustain their presence on this land, and meet two leadership contenders with differing ideas of the best way to proceed. Charles Kent (Harry Melling) is a terse, beady-eyed social architect, the first to lead any outsiders reaching this patch to the stocks; by contrast, Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones) is a hairy weirdo who roams the land as though he either has something grander on his mind or is completely away with the fairies. You can argue where these figures would fall on the modern political spectrum and which latter-day statesmen they most resemble, because Tsangari, like Crace before her, is doing everything within her grasp to dissolve the boundaries between past, present and future. These characters are fearful of others, buffeted by the elements, vulnerable to capital and starved of any vision for a better future; in many ways, they're meant to be read as Just Like Us, Really.

The film they populate stands as another example of that late-breaking method of adaptation that regards source material as both blueprint for and permission to build a theme park based on it. (One way of approaching it: as a cross between Villeneuve's Dune and Kevin Brownlow's Winstanley, or between Andrew Kötting's Zola-informed This Filthy Earth and Lars von Trier's The Idiots.) Harvest's strongest element is Nathan Parker's judicious, budget-conscious production design: it uses a few deft strokes at the edge of a field in Oban to carry us all back several centuries. The actors, a mix of adventurous emergent faces (Melling, Frank Dillane, Rosy McEwen, Thalissa Teixeira) and carefully sifted extras, are given their head to wander as they will and do more or less what they like, though the grimy Love Island vibe is occasionally disrupted by jolting rituals: business with masks and firepits that inevitably recalls The Wicker Man, the enforced bumping of heads against boundary stones. (No wonder everyone's so dizzy; here is a community at its most concussed.) The tactic proves immersive to a point, in that we're set down in the moment with characters who don't know how long that moment will last; Tsangari allows both the beauty of this spot and the uncertainty of those living off it to register. It's also perilously drifty, finally siding with Thirsk when it could badly do with a little more of Charles Kent's ruthlessness. Chevalier was governed by its characters' competitive streak: an Olympics for willy wagglers, it got funnier the more absurd it got. (It gave itself a goal, and somewhere to go.) This far glummer undertaking feels closer to filming the kind of actors' bootcamp Mike Leigh puts his performers through behind closed doors before honing a definitive script: from a dramatic viewpoint, it's more preparatory field study, tentatively sowing seeds, than especially fruitful harvest. By refusing to clear a decisive path through this territory, Tsangari instead strands us in the long grass alongside directionless characters doomed to turn in circles before disappearing from sight. (The film's first image - a raised hand sinking into sallow waves of corn - could just as easily be its last; nobody's getting anywhere.) Long, slow downward spirals tend to make for more absorbing novels than motion pictures; here, we're left watching the life drain out of this community like muddy water circling a drain. Tsangari's commitment to this piece of land is such that her film, too, emerges as terminally underdeveloped.

Harvest is now streaming via MUBI.