Dark River is the much-anticipated third feature from British writer/director Clio Barnard and it is one of those bleak, rural- England dramas featuring cement-coloured skies, wind, rain, mud, rusted old farm machinery and dead animals — do people who move out from the city know what they are letting themselves in for? — as well as the aftermath of childhood sexual abuse. (Should we pull them aside and have a word?) Apologies for sounding glib about such a heavy subject but this is, ultimately, so heavy-handed about that heavy subject it left me cold. I should point out, however, that other critics are available, and some are saying it is ‘powerful’ and ‘affecting’. So you pays your money and takes your pick.
Whereas Barnard’s two previous films — The Arbor and The Selfish Giant — were both terrific, and social-realist tours de force, this feels laboured from the off. Loosely inspired by Rose Tremain’s Trespass, and with the title taken from a Ted Hughes poem about grief and memory, it opens with Alice (Ruth Wilson), a sheep shearer, returning to her childhood home, a Yorkshire farm, following her father’s death. She believes he had promised the tenancy to her, and she is determined to claim her inheritance. As she drives though the hills, P.J. Harvey sings the deeply melancholic folk song ‘My Father Left Me an Acre of Land’ so we know that her arrival, after a 15-year absence, is not going to be greeted by a party, bunting, balloons and banners reading: ‘Welcome home Alice!’ (I wish!) Instead, she discovers that the farm has, yes, gone to ruin. Beneath that cement sky, she discovers not just the rusted old machinery and the mud but also a rat infestation and a sheep with a broken leg that needs to be shot and peeling paint and holes in the walls and broken fences and neglected fields.
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