Dark River
Alice is played in flashbacks by Esme Creed-Miles and in the main body of the film by Ruth Wilson, both of whom are extremely good. Quite aside from her emotive power (and sheep-shearing skills!) Wilson deserves credit for pulling off a flawless West Yorkshire accent, one that doesn’t sound affected when placed alongside natives like Sean Bean and Mark Stanley, the latter of whom comes close to stealing the whole film as Alice’s violent, troubled brother Joe. As for Bean, his role promises something to match his extraordinary recent television work for Jimmy McGovern (Broken) and Tony Grisoni (Red Riding), but it seems to have been cut down too much in the edit. Furthering this suspicion, the end credits mention a role for Una McNulty, who doesn’t appear in the final cut at all.
Despite these problems, Dark River is a visually striking film that’s confident enough to make you forget the risks Barnard is taking here. It is, after all, her most plot-driven film to date, and her first to feature big-name actors. She appears totally unfazed by both of these challenges, enough to make me suspect Dark River‘s weaknesses will be seen as a stumble in her career rather than a fall. There are signs, certainly, that this new wave of British rural drama might already be developing its own cliches: the farm full of dark family secrets, the townie-baiting scenes of animal slaughter. But Dark River also contains some truly refreshing, unique material, from the haunting underwater footage to PJ Harvey’s plaintive rendition of the English folk song ‘An Acre of Land’, which begins and ends the film.
http://thegeekshow.co.uk/2018/06/26/dark-river/Review: A ‘Dark River’ of Abuse Separates a Brother and Sister from Their Inheritance
The Yorkshire depicted in Clio Barnard’s third feature, “Dark River,” has much in common with that of Francis Lee’s recent triumph, “God’s Own Country”: a place of hard labor and lowering skies, of bleating sheep and repressed sexuality. Yet even in the swelling canon of British rural miserabilism, this unrelentingly intense psychodrama burrows beneath the skin.
Much of that is due to Ruth Wilson’s tough, traumatized performance as Alice, an itinerant sheep shearer who returns home to claim tenancy of the family farm. Fifteen years have passed, and her estranged brother, Joe (a fine Mark Stanley), who nursed their terminally ill father while the farm crumbled around them, is not having it. He might be a bitter drunk — and the farm, under his stewardship, a vermin-infested husk of the smallholding Alice remembers — but he feels equally owed his inheritance. And, unlike Alice, entirely unable to share it.
Gorgeously photographed by the Brazilian cinematographer Adriano Goldman, “Dark River” is a raw ballad of doom and damage. As in Ms. Barnard’s first feature, the 2011 experimental documentary “The Arbor,” it broodingly excavates the lingering grip of childhood abuse. Economic anxieties press in from outside, but it’s the farm’s fusty interiors, where every cranny conceals a flinching flashback, that spark Alice’s worst memories. As the ghost of her father (indelibly played by Sean Bean) slips in and out of the frame, she turns from steely survivor to terrified child. It almost hurts to look at her
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/28/movies/dark-river-review.htmlSibling rivalry simmers in the film Dark River
Ruth Wilson (Luther, The Affair) is on blistering form as tenacious farm worker, Alice, whose suffering is swallowed down in difficult silences and emotional distance. After the death of her father (Sean Bean) Alice returns home to apply for the tenancy of the family’s farm against the wishes of her long-suffering brother Joe (Mark Stanley) who nursed their sick father while keeping the farm barely afloat. Their taciturn exchanges are compelling in their awkwardness - tension seeping out from the unsaid until it boils over into physical conflict. Barnard’s dialogue is breathtakingly real: the first encounter between Alice and Joe in 15 years veers from cumbersome small talk to long held grudges and potent questions. The naturalistic performances of Wilson and Stanley draw attention to what is unspoken and suppressed. Together they bring emotional gravitas even to the film’s smallest moments. Dark River is a drama about secrets and silence and the damage caused is pervasive. Flashbacks are notoriously tricky to pull off but Barnard (The Arbor, The Selfish Giant) weaves them into the action with unrivalled lightness and subtlety as Alice’s traumatic past intrudes upon the present. A sinister Sean Bean continues to lurk in Alice’s life to such chilling degree that we begin to feel him pressing in at the very edges of the frame. In light of this, the way Alice mobilises her inner strength to try and rebuild her relationship with Joe - a relationship that seems fundamentally broken - makes for both hopeful and painful viewing. Attempts to save the crumbling farm begin to stand for something much more profound.
The harsh realities of agricultural work form the brutal and raw backdrop to this unfolding drama supported by British stalwarts Film 4, Screen Yorkshire and the BFI. The complexity of tenantfarming and the conflicts between financial survival and respecting the natural landscape filter into the very essence of the story. Physically and emotionally, Dark River, is rooted in the Yorkshire landscape. Its atmosphere makes for heady and potent drama.
https://www.derbyshiretimes.co.uk/whats-on/sibling-rivalry-simmers-in-the-film-dark-river-1-9225422 ‘Dark River’ Review: A Tired Drama that Lives Down to its Name
Most everything about Dark River feels tired.
The narrative around a taciturn woman who can skin a rabbit without flinching but is also fundamentally brittle is tired. That all we see her do for 90 minutes is react to the decisions made and actions taken by the men in her life is tired. Even the title is tired, with all the vivacity of a generic production placeholder (it’s literally being released on the same day as a film with the synonymous title Black Water).
The cinematography, too, has a lackluster lethargy to it, using the austere bucolic majesty of Yorkshire as a crutch. As films like last year’s The Florida Project have demonstrated, in skilled hands cinematographic beauty can be found just about anywhere, but Dark River is a data point from the opposite end of the spectrum. Shots more often than not give the impression that a camera was plopped in the corner of a field and pointed at the actors with a shrug and a “that’ll do.”
There are some welcome exceptions, like a handful of sequences with decidedly fetal imagery—again, perhaps a somewhat overplayed hand, but beautiful nonetheless—but these are unfortunately the exception as opposed to the rule. Like many things about the film, the end result, visually, is not genuinely bad so much as just fine, but coming from an accomplished cinematographer such as Adriano Goldman, whose credits include Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre and six episodes of The Crown, one expects so much more.
Ruth Wilson and Mark Stanley preform admirably as estranged brother-sister pair Alice and Joe, vying for the tenancy of the family farm after the death of their father, but in the end more is placed on their shoulders than perhaps any actor could successfully bear. Dark River was loosely adapted from Rose Tremain’s novel Trespass, and that the film is based on a novel that relies heavily on literature’s particular affinity for exploring interior lives—widely regarded as a particular weakness of film as a medium—is evident throughout. The basic cinematic translation of an interior monologue that a book could fully detail is a long take of an actor looking troubled. Far too often Dark River falls into the trap of films happy to leave things at this bare minimum, as if under the impression that if an actor acts hard enough, for lack of a better phrase, they can somehow telepathically broadcast their character’s thoughts to the audience. Ultimately, there is a fine line between being ambiguous, which is the degree of uncertainty inherent to the fundamental ability to ever truly enter the mind of another person, and opacity, which is staring at an actor staring into space.
On the supporting front, Sean Bean makes for a properly menacing “ghost” as Alice and Joe’s abusive father, Richard, in elegantly integrated flashbacks. If there is one regard in which Dark River excels, it is in editing. Flashback sequences intercut past and present seamlessly in a way that feels utterly natural—a feat which looks effortless when pulled off, but that relatively few films successfully accomplish, especially considering the frequency with which films utilize flashbacks. Ironically, an element that in many other films represents a weak point is one of Dark River‘s strengths, of which there are unfortunately few.
https://filmschoolrejects.com/dark-river-review/Dark River
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews
based on 20 Critics
http://www.metacritic.com/movie/dark-river/critic-reviews