Dark River review - sparkling central duo lift Clio Barnard's social-realist farm yarn
3 / 5 stars
Clio Barnard is the fiercely intelligent, visually inventive and innovative film-maker who gave us the brilliant docu-hybrid The Arbor and then The Selfish Giant, an inspired interpretation of Oscar Wilde set in Bradford. Her third feature, Dark River, is never anything other than acute and sensitive, with some very good actors giving well directed performances. But for all this movie’s qualities, it is a British social-realist picture in a well-understood idiom which perhaps doesn’t quite give us the shock of the new that her previous films delivered. And the appearance of a shotgun early on triggers the ancient Chekhov law about what happens to a gun that is produced in Act One: we are heading to a slightly melodramatic and functional ending.
Ruth Wilson is excellent as Alice, a young woman who has been earning money with seasonal work on farms. Then she receives news that her widower father has died, and she must return to the family home, a tenant farm in North Yorkshire, which her brother Joe (Mark Stanley) has let become a ruin. He has driven himself almost to a breakdown looking after their ill father and is enraged with Alice for running out on them, leaving him to do all the work. Their relationship explodes into open warfare when Alice fiercely reveals that she intends to apply to the farm’s freeholder for permission to become the sole tenant, effectively in control. She believes this is what she is owed, because the awful truth is that her father abused her. And as for Joe, he has his own motives for making a counter-claim to the tenancy.
Their troubled past is revealed in disturbing flashbacks, with Esme Creed-Miles and Aiden McCollough as the younger Alice and Joe, and Sean Bean as their father, like a vivid ghost, as Alice is haunted by memories of the house – particularly her own bedroom, which she cannot bear to go near. Ruth Wilson’s face and body language give us access to the wounded and unhappy girl that grew up there. But as an adult, she can see how the farm is becoming increasingly unprofitable. Naturally, Joe resents her interventions; Barnard’s writing and Stanley’s performance show how he does not have the emotional language to express his resentment, fear and guilt in anything other than violence. And of course this violence is heading only in one direction.
Their escalating confrontation is complicated by two faces of officialdom who appear on their property. One is a prissy land agent in spotless Wellington boots; the other is a breezy estate management executive who tells Joe about how certain factors could see him favoured for the tenancy over his sister. Wilson and Stanley are both excellent performers and they are the mainstays of a valuable piece of work, but I felt the ending was contrived and a bit grandiloquent. However, the visual style and fluency of the film are obvious.
Dark River is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released in the UK on 7 January.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/sep/15/dark-river-review-clio-barnard-ruth-wilson-toronto-film-festival-tiffDark River: A bleak folk dirge to bury the past
Sheep shearer Alice (Ruth Wilson) returns to her family’s farm in Yorkshire after an absence of 15 years, following her father Richard’s (Sean Bean) death. There, for the first time since her departure, she will encounter her brother Joe (Mark Stanley), who has been left behind taking care of their sick father and the property. Alice is back to claim the tenancy to their farm, which comes as a surprise to Joe, and so a conflict will emerge between them. At the same time, more landlords are starting to consider Alice as a threat. As she tries to salvage her relationship with her brother, she’s also fighting her traumatic memories, since their father sexually abused her as a teenager.
Dark River is a disturbingly poignant drama that immediately captures the viewer’s attention, while the exploration of its bleak, intimate subject matter takes its time to unfold. Barnard felt inspired by the 2010 novel Trespass, written by Rose Tremain, which she developed into a script along with her producer Lila Rawlings, and the story probes this tentative relationship between two adult siblings and the struggle of dealing with memory and the exploitation of a woman.
Using the tenancy as an excuse, Alice aims to confront and unearth the past. She needs to release this tension and take Joe along with her on her devastating journey. It is important for her to reach closure, even if it seems almost impossible. Alice returns more unprotected than ever, to a male-dominated environment where she has to exorcise her own demons and evolve on a personal level. Wilson, known from her roles in the series The Affair and Luther, feels like the perfect actress to portray a courageous lead character who has been a victim in the past, but who has now created a strong and independent persona in order to survive. Behind her inscrutable mask, Alice still needs a place and time to feel released from her past, and a dark river will be the perfect medium in which to bury her traumatic memories.
To enhance the verisimilitude of the story, the filmmaker carried out extensive research while building the characters in her film. She collaborated with acclaimed forensic psychiatrists who specialise in dealing with both survivors and perpetrators of sexual abuse. This meticulous process allowed Barnard to expose the core of her protagonists and, without resorting to anything artificial, to deliver characters that are bare and realistic, and which offer a natural emotional impact that can only be likened to the untouched purity of the countryside around them. With its strong attachment to its rural Yorkshire location, and echoing with the rhymes of PJ Harvey’s version of the folk song “Acre of Land”, Dark River becomes a bleak folk dirge about a buried past.
http://cineuropa.org/nw.aspx?t=newsdetail&l=en&did=334854Dark River (Clio Barnard, UK) — Platform
The places you’ve lived are like the people you’ve loved: you can leave them all you want but they’ll never be gone. The inextricability of space and emotion, the way we infuse familiar places with the ghosts of our memories, is at the core of Dark River, a grim tale that explores the subtle differences between coming back and coming home. Clio Barnard’s film concerns its protagonist’s physical return to her family’s farm, but insinuates a certain reluctance to rummage through the sentimental landscape embedded under its creaking and decaying surface.
From the outside looking in, Alice’s (Ruth Wilson) return is transactional, law-abiding, and the kind of business a dutiful daughter and sister would do—but on the inside is a pool of undisclosed pain and resentment on the verge of overflowing. They say trauma comes in twos: the first time is the actual event, whereas the second is a simulacrum of that violence—a vivid reopening of the emotional wound, which in Alice’s case is triggered by the physical state of being there (again).
However, despite the potential in Barnard’s thematic setup and Wilson’s fine performance, Dark River ultimately amounts to less than the sum of its parts, weighed down by its unfocused style and unevenly paced narrative reveal. The mishandled flashbacks and cheaply shocking apparitions seem to be at odds with the film’s more nuanced sensibilities; the combination of slow and artful camerawork with messy, lukewarm thrills doesn’t work in this case, culminating in a less than gratifying—not to mention unnecessarily drastic—finale. Like Alice herself, the film attempts to cover grounds too extensive and discordant to harmonize.
http://cinema-scope.com/cinema-scope-online/dark-river-clio-barnard-uk-platform/