Caleb Landry Jones in the adaptation of Jim Crace's novel

The latest feature film by Greek writer, director and producer Athina Rachel Tsangari is from 2015 Knighta sly black comedy that lampoons male hyper-competitiveness, building on the promise of his first two acclaimed works, Attenberg (2010) and The slow progress of going (2000). These place her at the forefront of the strange Greek wave together with her compatriot Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor things), whose early works he often produced. Now Tsangari returns to Venice, where Attenberg it caused a lot of stir, with Harvesta work of marked maturity and sobriety, less strange than sad and woad-tinged, based on the acclaimed novel of the same name by Jim Crace. The result is a moving, if deliberately ahistorical, study of a lost agrarian paradise.

Like Crace's book, Harvest the film never specifies when and where the story takes place. However, the ensemble's Scottish accents, which range from Glaswegian to more northern, Teacher Highland cadences proper, suggest a location north of Hadrian's Wall. (It was filmed in Argyllshire.) The narrative appears to be set between about 1750 and 1860, when the Highland Clearances largely depopulated Scotland's arable lands. Scots were forced to change the terms of their leases and become crofters or leave altogether, as landowners sought to turn commonly cultivated fields into more profitable pastures for sheep and cows.

While the Clearances supposedly helped kick-start the Industrial Revolution in cities further south and create a Scottish diaspora that profoundly shaped and built the British Empire, they are often seen as a great tragedy for the Scottish people, lamented especially by the left, who tend to romanticise pre-Clearance communities as proto-socialist utopias. Tsangari and, to some extent, Crace are somewhat inclined to the latter view. The very lack of historical markers or references to time or geography here turns the nameless village into the centre of Harvest in a kind of Eden, where happy farmers sing songs together while mowing the fields and later rejoice (perhaps a little too much) with the local landowner during the harvest festival.

To its credit, the script isn’t entirely dreamy about the good old days. Although the story is supposedly told by Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones, who mostly nails the accent), given the voice-over narration, the camera does note the guilty looks of a group of young men as the community wonders who started the fire they all band together to put out at the beginning of the film. Thirsk injures his hand in the fire while saving Willowjack, the horse belonging to Master Charles Kent (the protean Harry Melling). Thirsk is suggested to be slightly smarter than most of his neighbors, having been raised with Kent as a child and having learned to read and write. But he’s also a bit of a passive guy and basically an outsider despite his many years in the area and marriage to a now-dead local woman.

This may explain why he doesn't back down when everyone wants to blame the fire on a trio of strangers seen nearby. When they are caught, the two men (Gary Maitland and Noor Dillan-Night) are pilloried without even a show trial. The woman (Thalissa Teixeira) has her head forcibly shaved by one of the villagers, Kitty Gosse (Rosy McEwen).

These are just the first encounters with strangers in what turns out to be a very eventful week. Another newcomer is Phillip Earle (Arinze Kene), a cartographer with a decidedly un-Scottish accent who has been hired by Master Kent to map the town and its environs. With his injured hand preventing him from doing more grueling work, Thirsk is seconded to help Earle, whom the villagers nickname Quill. Thirsk's new duties include preparing parchment and identifying the area's various landmarks, few of which have more than the most generic of names. (For example, the lake is simply called “the lake.”) Earle is delighted at the opportunity to play Adam in this Eden and begin dispensing new proper names for the marshes, fields, and so on.

This does not go down well with the locals, who believe that naming or drawing something somehow defines it and therefore destroys it. As medieval and mystical as it may seem, they are not entirely wrong. It turns out that Earle's real employer is Edmund Jordan (Frank Dillane from Fear the walking deadenjoying being mean), a wealthy Englishman who somehow manages to make a pudding bowl haircut look sinister. Jordan is the only relative of Master Kent's late wife and therefore the true heir to the estate, not Kent. He plans to introduce sheep farming on a grand scale, in the classic Highland Clearance style, so inevitably things don't end well. There are several dead bodies at the end, including one killed by the most unusual of methods: drowning caused by someone urinating into someone's mouth, like a cross between waterboarding and a golden shower.

The last scene is just bordering on silly, and some viewers may find themselves chuckling in a way the filmmakers surely didn't intend. The impulse may arise elsewhere, too. Working with the script's half-declamatory, half-poetic style, the cast ends up sounding like idiotic peasants in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who can tell a person is of noble birth because they have “no shit on them.” The awkwardness may be partly attributable to the fact that this is Tsangari's first English-language feature film in over two decades. Or maybe it was intentional.

It's hard to know, just as it's a little unclear what we're to make of the casting of Earle as an educated black man in an era when that would have been extremely rare, and two of the foreigners, presumably from a few villages away, as considerably darker than the pale Scots in the village. Perhaps it's a nod to Brexit and the racism that has risen like the scum on the surface of contemporary societies, both in Britain and elsewhere. Despite these issues, Harvest It stands tall and strong, a work as solid as an oak. Full of a sensual love of nature and a distinctive atmosphere, it is as sour as a home-brewed beer.