Film / Reviews
Review: Dark River
Dark River (15)
UK 2018 90 mins Dir: Clio Barnard Cast: Ruth Wilson, Mark Stanley, Sean Bean, Esme Creed-Miles Aiden McCollough
It’s hard to review Clio Barnard’s grim-oop-north social realist follow-up to her lauded The Selfish Giant without reference to its similarities to Hope Dickson Leach’s superior grim-down-south social realist drama The Levelling. Both are low-budget films directed by women and have a female protagonist returning to the family farm after the death of a close relative. Each of these faces resentment over their long absence, family relationships are more than a little strained, and the drama unfolds against the background of the tough economics of modern farming. Both films feature plenty of shit, mud and sweat, and neither shies away from depicting the realities of animal husbandry (look away now if you don’t like the sight of giblets), functioning as unintended advertisements for veganism.
We’re on a North Yorkshire sheep farm rather than a Somerset dairy farm this time. Following the death of her father, Alice (Wilson) comes back after 15 years of living the life of an itinerant seasonal worker. The reason for this traumatised young woman’s departure is hinted at in an early scene in which she flinches from human contact. Up on t’moor, we find her mostly drunken and dishevelled brother Joe (Mark Stanley – Grenn in Game of Thrones) seething with resentment over being left to look after their dying father, having let the rat-infested farm go to rack and ruin. Unable to bring herself to sleep in the farmhouse for reasons that very quickly become clear, Alice repairs to the grotty, inhospitable ‘prefab’ and enrages her sibling still further when she announces that she intends to apply for the tenancy on the grounds that he’s incapable of running the farm. Turns out that he has an ulterior motive for securing the tenancy for himself.
We’re on very familiar earthy rural feelbad territory here, with Sean Bean haunting the farmhouse malevolently in flashback as the siblings’ father. Indeed, there’s an unnecessary barrage of flashbacks, especially when the film spills over into melodrama, with Esme Creed-Miles and Aiden McCollough playing the younger Alice and Joe. But The Affair star Ruth Wilson is absolutely riveting throughout with a visceral performance that has little need of dialogue to convey her damaged character’s pain. She’s also clearly put the time in to convince as both a sheep-shearer and Yorkshirewoman. Naysayers may be forgiven, however, for finding this all rather parodically overwrought.
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