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DARK RIVER | FILM REVIEW
****
Dir: Clio Barnard
Starring: Ruth Wilson, Mark Stanley, Sean Beean
(15, 1 hr 38 mins)
The latest film from writer/director Clio Barnard who brought us the excellent The Selfish Giant is another foray into well-observed British misery. Ruth Wilson stars as Alice, returning home to the farm she grew up on with her brother Joe, played by Adam Stanley.
She has been travelling the world, doing what she grew up learning, working on farms and shearing sheep. She left her family farm 15 years ago and now, in the wake of her father’s death, she can return. Sean Bean plays the father, sparingly used in flashback, who had abused her growing up; he haunts the farm with his presence, glimpsed in rooms by Wilson as she struggles to re-adjust. She is seeking out the tenancy of the farm, which she believes to be rightfully hers, against her brother’s wishes, who obviously bears a grudge against her, leaving him to deal with the fallout of her moving away and nursing the father who abused her.
These simmering emotions and regrets are always under the surface, boiling over as the battle for the farm intensifies. A developer wants the land, the brother could sign away the rights but Alice believes it to be hers. Tragedy ultimately rears its head with the farm facing ruin and Alice pushed towards the demons of her past.
Detailed and muscular, Dark River draws a very rich portrait of the central characters and their environment. Wilson is superb as ever, conveying the loss of her childhood, raw determination and willingness to build bridges with her brother with deft, believable skill. Stanley is also convincing as the brother who failed to stop what was happening to his sister, pulled in many directions as he struggles to rid himself of guilt and debt. Barnard is a great observer of human nature, allowing the actors to excel while placing them amidst an evocatively captured landscape, as unforgiving as the abuse suffered by all. The landscape is another character, at times beautiful but also savage. Not exactly feel-good but another brilliantly captured corner of character-led British life from Barnard.
words KEIRON SELF
Out now in cinemas