Following her father’s death, a woman returns to the farm she grew up on after 15 years, but the reunion with her brother will have nothing but dire consequences.
The hand-held camera and close-ups of Alice after the opening sequence speak volumes from the very beginning about her esoteric world. Upon her return to the farm and the siblings’ reunion, Ruth Wilson and Mark Stanley do a great job as estranged brother and sister, but the moment’s awkwardness, as well as the rest of the film’s pace and rhythm, are well-controlled by the editors Luke Dunkley and Nick Fenton. Writer/director Clio Barnard, a Yorkshire lass born and raised, works with the excellent cinematographer Adriano Goldman and delves into the personal drama Alice and Joe have to endure while simultaneously developing the tribulations of owning a farm nowadays. On one hand, their personal suffering seems impossible to deal with. While we get glimpses of the past, we can only imagine how hard it is for Alice to be back there. What we don’t know until much later on is how much Joe knows and how he positions himself in this predicament. Thus, we cannot fully comprehend the animosity between them.
On the other hand, owning that farm and its innumerable troubles only escalates that tension. What ideally could have happened, what did happen, how it could have been dealt with, and how it was actually dealt with creates a family disaster of galactic proportions. That intensity is what describes the film. If I were forced to pick on something, that would be the fact that the tone is gloom and doom from beginning to end. As Dark River is mainly a drama, I would expect it to give some hope before it takes it back. Instead, it keeps slowly and steadily taking it, leaving you bereft. Hence, the narrative’s element of surprise is lost there as, from a certain point on, you know that every new sequence you are about to watch will be yet another disastrous encounter between the siblings.
Don’t be discouraged by that, though. Dark River is the poster child of British indie cinema, and it only evokes emotions from relatable stories and characters and surfaces real dramas that take place in the world that you and I live in. Watch it and get to know England so much differently from the films that open with an aerial shot of London, shot wherever else after that, and dive into banalities that allegedly describe England. Dark River combines cinematic realism and the English countryside, free of stereotypes and clichés.
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