The Harvest movie review & film summary (2015)

The opening scenes put one in mind of one of Steven Spielberg's Amblin productions of the 1980s or Stephen King. In them, Maryann (Natasha Calis), a young tomboy still reeling from the recent death of her father, has been uprooted to upstate New York to live with her well-meaning grandparents (Peter Fonda and Leslie Lyles). While roaming the neighborhood one day, she comes across a house with a small corn patch growing outside of a window and decides to investigate. Behind that window is Andy (Charlie Tahan), a bedridden boy about her age, and she decides to take matters into hand by literally climbing through the window and introducing herself. Sickly and home-schooled, Andy is thrilled to have someone his age to spend time with and the only hiccup comes when his mom, Katherine (Samantha Morton) arrives to discover this new and unexpected interloper—she is pleasant enough to Maryann in theory but it is clearly obvious that the girl is not exactly welcome.

Not that this stops Maryann from coming over to see Andy and even his father, Richard (Michael Shannon)—who quit his job as a nurse to look after his son while his wife continued to work as a pediatric surgeon—seems happy that his son has made a friend, but Katherine's reaction to the girl grows frostier and frostier until she flat-out tells her not to come back. When that doesn't stop Maryann, Katherine turns on Andy in cruel ways that go beyond mere overprotectiveness into insanely unreasonable. Clearly there is more going on than meets the eye and when Maryann finally gets a glimpse of what is really happening but cannot convince anyone of her suspicions, she takes it upon herself to attempt a rescue of Andy from Katherine's clutches, without realizing until it is too late the lengths that she is willing to go through in order to do what she feels is best for her son.

The last few months have seen the beginnings of a long-overdue renaissance in low-key horror filmmaking with the releases of such winners as "The Babadook," "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night" and the current hit "It Follows" and even though "The Harvest" was made back in 2013 and is only now getting released, it fits in nicely with those achievements. First-time screenwriter Stephen Lancellotti has done a nice job of crafting a story that relies more on slow-burn tension than dumb shock moments and includes a few nifty bits of misdirection that will even catch some longtime fans of the genre off-guard. More importantly, his screenplay also gives a welcome sense of complexity to its characters as well—even at her worst moments, for example, Katherine has been written in a way that allows us to understand and empathize with her to a certain degree. Likewise, McNaughton does an excellent job of keeping the tension mounting throughout—even a simple game of catch turns into a suspenseful setpiece in his hands—without resorting to the kind of grotesque extremes that he deployed so memorably in "Henry."

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