Swanvale Halt Film Club: Dark River (2017)

Had it not been for PJ Harvey I wouldn't have watched Clio Barnard's latest movie, as she sings the theme, 'An Acre of Land', the arrangement of which she put together with the film's composer Harry Escott. You can find other versions of this old folk song around, treating it as a jaunty little bit of whimsy, with its fairytale imagery of ploughing the field with a ram's horn and reaping it with a tooth-comb; that seems to have been how Ralph Vaughn-Williams regarded it when he put it to music. As we might expect, PJH takes this charming rhyme and turns it into a baleful vision of something approaching madness. If the commission didn't inspire her to begin her planned poem cycle 'about a haunted sheep farm in Dorset' it's yet another instance of the strange synchronicity which marks the singer's life.

The haunted sense is nothing more than appropriate. Clio Barnard's film takes the idea of Rose Tremain's 2010 novel Trespass, transplants it to north Yorkshire, and gives it a title lifted from a Ted Hughes poem so the viewer should have some idea what they're going to get. After years spent sheep-shearing across the world, Alice returns to the farm she believes her father promised her, to rescue it along with a conflicted relationship with her brother Joe who's worn out by looking after both the land and their father. But that father still haunts the run-down farmhouse, commercial sharks are circling, and it's not going to end well. To be fair, though, it's not as bleak as the book.

As many critics have said, the film is very thinly plotted and there's a sense as it draws to an end that even that minimal story is falling over itself to come to a conclusion. Its beauty is that it takes a group of people who live lives on the edge of mainstream modernity (as Clio Barnard did with her previous feature, The Selfish Giant which I confess I also watched on the basis of PJH's involvement with this one) and treats that experience with both great rigour and great tenderness. It argues that the passions surrounding a neglected Yorkshire sheep farm are as worthy of consideration as any others.