Ruth Wilson and Mark Stanley are grimly compelling in Clio Bernard’s Dark River
“These farms aren’t making any money any more”
As we’ve seen in recent weeks, farmers will be the first to tell you they have it rough but I doubt many of them have it quite so bleak as the folk in Dark River. Loosely based on Rose Tremain’s novel Trespass, writer/director Clio Barnard has relocated the story to a sheep farm in deepest Yorkshire, whose rolling hills contains family secrets, long-held resentments and all manner of repressed feelings.
At the heart of it is Ruth Wilson’s Alice, relatively content as a sheep shearer until news of her father’s death prompts a return to the homestead she had been told she would inherit. But it’s been 15 years since she was last there, her brother – Mark Stanley’s Joe – has seriously neglected the place and once over the threshold, flashbacks of troubling events from the past rock her sanity.
With one sibling haunted by sexual abuse in the past and the other wracked by alcohol abuse in the present, their’s is an uneasy relationship but Wilson and Stanley sell it, both gruffly uncommunicative in the main, a grudging respect threatens to flourish as he sees the logic in her future plans and she comes to realise the respect he’s showing to the land and its wildlife through his approach.
But money worries, violent tendencies and that nagging inconvenience of the trauma of the past (embodied by Sean Bean as a ghost) set Dark River on an even darker path. As wild weather whips the moors and painful revelations threaten to rupture everything, there’s a slight tip towards melodrama that perhaps doesn’t feel strictly necessary.
