Dark River

Dark River is the third notable British film released within a year to dramatise the trials both economic and familial in UK farming, and hits some of the same beats as Hope Dickson Leach's The Levelling, in which a daughter returns to a threatened family farm in Somerset, and Francis Lee's God's Own Country, set like Dark River in Yorkshire. Earthy, elemental, authentic and fitted with an emotional hair trigger, writer/director Clio Barnard's third feature is a welcome addition to this "farm noir" subgenre. It mucks in with the everyday tasks of a working sheep farm, but at its heart is a dirty family wound reopened when itinerant daughter Alice (Ruth Wilson) returns after 15 years to help her stubborn brother Joe (Mark Stanley) save the small holding from ruin. Their father (Sean Bean), nursed in terminal illness by Joe, appears in flashback and apparition, looming over his children's lives as ominously as the farm's circling landlords. Though Wilson and Stanley convince utterly with their husbandry skills in more collaborative moments, it is their psychological courage that makes their relationship so real and elevates the film beyond the benighted barnyard.