Dark River

Dark River (2018)
Director: Clio Barnard
Actors: Ruth Wilson, Mark Stanley, Sean Bean

Synopsis: Alice (Ruth Wilson) returns to her dilapidated family farm some 15 years after she left suddenly. There she encounters her hostile brother, Joe (Mark Stanley), and some unnerving ghosts of her own…

Review: Resembling little more than a poorly constructed horror film, Clio Barnard’s Dark River is a remarkably hamfisted, dramatically impoverished work that has very little to offer beneath its superficial veneer of a form of pastoral, poetic realism currently de rigueur in British arthouse cinema.

Barnard’s main problem is that she makes everything so earnestly subservient to the shallow, singular conceit of her narrative. For the film to work, her characters needed to be more than the identikit ciphers they are, and the structural hook of Alice’s processing of her childhood abuse merging with the present-day horrors of having to deal with the ruinous state of her family farm needed to be much subtler and perhaps only revealed in the closing moments rather than being telegraphed throughout by comically linear flashbacks.

There is little depth or nuance to Barnard’s style. She falls back on rote symbolism: nearly every section is foregrounded by an inert, clichéd, gothically picturesque view of the wild imperiousness of the British rural landscape, and the conceit of the brutality of farming life is used laboriously to fasttrack the import of Alice being a current and historic victim to patriarchal forces. The pièce de résistance of this film’s rhetorical juvenility is when Barnard cuts portentously between Alice gutting a rabbit while her brother has an EastEnders-style fit of violence in the adjoining building.

In subject matter and narrative, Dark River is uncannily similar to Hope Dickson Leach’s The Levelling from last year, but that is where all comparison ends, as The Levelling has a level of sophistication and depth that this hysterical schlocker could only dream of. (February 2018)