Family drama that gets under your fingernails
Dark River is the latest addition to a burgeoning trend of films set deep in rural Britain, occupying the same grey, gritty pastoral space as last year’s exquisite God’s Own Country. It’s the work of Clio Barnard, the intelligent auteur-director whose first two features, The Arbor and The Selfish Giant, traded in poetic realism and offered wild milieus rife with poverty and familial dysfunction. Dark River is similarly severe: the dialogue is spare and even the clouds are portentous.
The fact that it’s not as bracing as The Selfish Giant, nor as lyrical, is certainly not the fault of its cast. Ruth Wilson, finally landing the meaty film role her talent deserves, is excellent as Alice, a woman who’s spent 15 years drifting from farm to farm, working as a sheep shearer. As the film opens to the desolate strains of the English folk standard An Acre of Land – performed with spine-tingling intensity by PJ Harvey – Alice receives news of her father’s death.
Warily, she returns to her decaying childhood farm in North Yorkshire to claim what she believes she’s entitled to, although her irascible, downtrodden older brother Joe (Game of Thrones’s Mark Stanley) isn’t going to let that happen easily.
What emerges is both a portrait of sibling resentment and study of the effects of childhood abuse, loosely adapted from Rose Tremain’s France set novel Trespass.
From brief flashbacks, we glimpse the sexual violations inflicted upon a teenage Alice (played by Esme Creed-miles) by her father (Sean Bean). So traumatised is Alice that she can now scarcely set foot inside the family house. But there’s more. Apparently, her brother’s known about the abuse all along, yet let it happen.
Not for nothing has Alice applied to become the sole tenant.
As tension between them escalates, both actors rise to the challenge: Wilson, especially, brings a skittishness and solitude to the role, her face conveying Alice’s nightmarish past with great subtlety.
Where Dark River lets itself down, though, is with a script that verges on overblown and a thudding lack of characterisation outside of the leads. Indeed, so brutally has the film been pared back in the editing suite that a couple of the characters – one of whom is pivotal to the disappointing denouement – feel like ciphers, floating aimlessly across the rainsoaked Yorkshire moors.
Still, working with Brazilian cinematographer Adriano Goldman (The Crown), Barnard once again evokes a grubby, Gothic landscape that’ll get right under your fingernails. It’ll stay there for weeks.