HARVEST had its world premiere at Venice and its UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival in 2025, but appeared for its most important premiere, its Scottish premiere, at Glasgow Film Festival this year. This screening’s importance was due to the film’s embeddedness in Scotland, both set and filmed in the Highlands. However, the inconsistent sense of Scottishness and the inauthenticity that this creates prove to be one of the many issues with the film.

In an undefined area in an undefined time, a feudal village is overseen benevolently by the laird, Master Kent (Harry Melling), and his voice among the peasants, Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones). Life goes on here, but eventfully; barns burn down, strange people invade the boundaries of the land, and a foreign cartographer (Arinzé Kene) maps the area. The arrival of a Master Jordan (Frank Dillane) with a fresh claim over the estate ownership threatens this pastoral idyll as he moves to clear the land for large-scale pastoral farming.

“The film flails about with a series of disconnected and tonally inconsistent scenes, before settling into its major rhythm far too late.”

This summary disguises poor pacing, with the film plodding throughout, especially during the initial 45 minutes before any underlying narrative thread emerges. The film flails about with a series of disconnected and tonally inconsistent scenes, before settling into its major rhythm far too late. Instead of using this time to establish characters, the film frequently uses characters to say things that don’t match what we’re being shown on screen: we are told that Walt and Master Kent are childhood friends but that lifelong friendship doesn’t come through in the performances; we are told that the men of the village lust after the bewitching Mistress Beldam (Thalissa Teixeira) but aren’t shown them doing so.

In its first hour, the film establishes a sense of place partly through conversations between Walt and the cartographer. The landscape is familiarly Scottish, and the villagers (including Walt) speak with Scottish accents. Unfortunately, the film feels unmoored; simultaneously embedded in and disconnected from Scotland. HARVEST is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Jim Crace, which was set somewhere unspecified in England. The film’s writer and director, Athina Rachel Tsangari, moved the setting to Scotland but aimed, as she made clear in a Q&A after the GFF premiere, to tell a story that “didn’t have a specific time or a specific place.”

“Transplanting the story to Scotland turns it into a story about the Highland Clearances, but without any specifically Scottish context apart from the filming location. This disconnect creates a sense of inauthenticity that comes out in a series of irritating anachronisms…”

Transplanting the story to Scotland turns it into a story about the Highland Clearances, but without any specifically Scottish context apart from the filming location. This disconnect creates a sense of inauthenticity that comes out in a series of irritating anachronisms and a feeling of separation from the land that is at odds with the film’s themes around community and social embeddedness in a place. This displacement from Scottish context isn’t helped by Caleb Landry Jones’ horrendous attempt at a Scottish accent, which sounds all the more unconvincing for being heard against the authentic accents of the great cast of local Argyll actors.

The story eventually leads to a tiresomely literalised depiction of the enclosures of the Highland Clearances and attempts to grapple with ideas – relevant to the contemporary United States context – of common or public property being seized and privatised. There’s also an interesting though underdeveloped idea around cartography as a form of flattening and a tool of capitalist expansionism. However, the film is too tonally inconsistent and tediously obtuse to harvest any emotional substance from the ideas that it sows.