By ’eck, it’s a bleak house for our Alice

CLIO BARNARD’S last film as writerdirector, 2013’s The Selfish Giant, was a small masterpiece, its terrible bleakness leavened by wit and humanity. Dark River, set like The Selfish Giant in Yorkshire, is just terribly bleak.

Ruth Wilson plays Alice (pictured), who after 15 years away as a contract sheep-shearer, returns to the ramshackle tenant farm where she grew up. Her father has died, leaving only her brother Joe (Mark Stanley).

Any pleasure he might derive from seeing her again is registered in that Yorkshire farmer’s way, by an almost imperceptible upturning at the sides of his mouth. But then they have nothing much to smile about.

Joe has let the farm collapse around him, and is too set in his ways to see how it might be made more profitable. And Alice, as a child, was sexually abused by their father (seen in flashback and played by Sean Bean). Joe did not protect her. Now she wants what she thinks is morally hers: the sole tenancy of the farm.

The quarrel over which of them should have the tenancy drives a further wedge between the siblings, which is only resolved in the most tragic of circumstances.

All this is beautifully acted; Wilson seems as perfectly cast as she was as a highly-sexed American waitress in the raunchy TV drama The Affair, which says plenty about her ability, and Stanley is excellent, too.

But the dialogue could probably be contained on two sides of A4; Barnard prefers her characters to internalise their feelings, not articulate them, which becomes frustrating for the audience long before the end. Or rather, t’ end.