Dark Riv­er

Call it the New Rural­ism: a recent run of low­ish-bud­get home­grown fea­tures that have broad­ened British cinema’s hori­zons by return­ing to the soil. Prac­ti­cal winds guide these projects; there may be less com­pe­ti­tion for Screen York­shire fund­ing than there is at Film Lon­don. Yet this grass­roots ini­tia­tive also speaks to a grow­ing empa­thy between our cre­atives and the nation’s farmhands, toil­ing long hours at society’s fringes for scant recompense.

Clio Barnard’s Dark Riv­er forms the third born-in-a-barn movie to open inside a year, enough to con­vert emi­nent anom­alies The Lev­el­ling and God’s Own Coun­try into a move­ment of sorts, even if, dra­mat­i­cal­ly, it is by far the slight­est of the three.

Barnard’s agri­cul­tur­al home­com­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly suf­fers from arriv­ing so soon after The Lev­el­ling, com­pared to which it seems both famil­iar and more flim­sy. The minute pro­tag­o­nist Alice (Ruth Wil­son) re-enters her family’s dilap­i­dat­ed farm­house on the Moors, we again sense major work needs doing. Her time and atten­tion will sub­se­quent­ly be split between way­ward live­stock, a bluff broth­er (Mark Stan­ley) plot­ting to sell the land, and a raft of phan­toms in flash­backs. The most loom­ing of these: the sib­lings’ just-deceased father (Sean Bean), whose pres­ence sug­gests Alice has returned to con­front some lin­ger­ing child­hood trauma.

That process ensures Dark Riv­er emerges as Barnard’s most explic­it­ly fem­i­nist work yet, cen­tred on a woman deter­mined to fix up a prop­er­ty in the face of mas­cu­line indif­fer­ence or aggres­sion, and there­by fix up her­self. The direc­tor has a fierce ally in the begrimed Wil­son, whose harassed gaze and air imply some­one with a hun­dred more sheep to dip before sun­down. ​“Your moth­er were a hard-nosed bitch an’ all,” jeers an auc­tion-house cow­poke, and this direc­tor-star com­bo clear­ly intends to reclaim that insult as a badge of hon­our. Yet Alice’s head­strong progress towards some­thing like inde­pen­dence is under­mined by Barnard’s shaki­est screen­play to date.

Nar­ra­tive­ly, Dark Riv­er feels both under­de­vel­oped and over­wrought, its mys­tery trau­ma guess­able the first time Ghost Dad Bean hov­ers a beat too long in a bed­room door­way. Much of the sup­port­ing char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion is sim­i­lar­ly spec­tral. Set against God’s Own Country’s sub­tly shad­ed York­shire­men, Stanley’s Joe is an arrant bas­tard, slash­ing and burn­ing rather than putting in the phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al labour required to rebuild – yet Barnard is heav­i­ly reliant on his tantrums to seize drift­ing view­er atten­tion. A word­less inter-sib­ling coda proves far more effec­tive, but also a reminder of what might have been.

Barnard’s acclaimed first fea­tures The Arbor and The Self­ish Giant posi­tioned her as an indus­try fig­ure­head overnight, which per­haps explains why her third film feels so rushed: these cramped 90 min­utes have no time to notice the scenery, and are caught strain­ing to make the acci­den­tal death of a day play­er trag­ic (even then, the fall­out hard­ly con­vinces). It’s not Barnard’s fault that Dark Riv­er rolls in behind two bar-rais­ing films in a sim­i­lar eld; yet it was entire­ly her call to lay hack­neyed thun­der­claps over her plot’s more melo­dra­mat­ic troughs. Fin­gers crossed she’ll get back on track – this time, her real­ism feels odd­ly, dis­ap­point­ing­ly inorganic.