Review of The Harvest (2015) by Drauchdoes2015 — 12 Apr 2015

A neat little under-the-radar thriller devoid of both mindless overindulgence, but also the minimum requisite level of thrills to even classify it in the horror genre, The Harvest's biggest asset, as well as it's achilles heel, is it's restraint. This is a film more courteous than many a scare-flick, but it's sensitivity to character interaction is in the service of a story that is neither scary, nor interesting.

The Harvest centers around an orphaned girl who, after moving to a new neighborhood with her grandparents, befriends a deathly ill boy. Her attempts at friendship are met with resistance by the boy's overprotective, venomous mother. I'll avoid redundancy and cut to the chase: it turns out that the boy is actually a child stolen from the hospital raised for the purpose of a heart transplant for the couple's REAL son, who is kept in a hospital room built into the family's basement.

This turn, though less silly than I'd initially assumed, is still ripe with obvious plot-holes. How has no one, in the SEVERAL years that the boy has been kidnapped, ever seen inside the basement? There was a window leading right to the room, even the passing observer could accidentally catch a glance of the room. Why did the couple wait for several years to raise the kidnapped boy, rather than transplant his heart the moment they returned home? The mother being a doctor herself eliminates the need for the boy to be taken to the hospital, where it could be discovered he is not biologically their son, but the whole thing could've been avoided had they put their real son on a waiting list for a transplant. But then we wouldn't have our premise, would we?

I'm willing to suspend my disbelief enough to buy into an absurd concept if it is executed thoughtfully and comes through on it's promise of legit thrills, but The Harvest fails to generate any sense of tension for, no exaggeration, the first 50-minutes. The climax, though containing a subtle, touching moment involving Shannon's character, boils down to little more than a chase through the forest, that ends with the mother simply leaving the children to get away to return home. What tension was drawn in the final moments deflates instantly when the antagonist chooses to simply turn around and leave our heroes alone, a resolve that sounds to silly to even attempt.

Quick mention, there is a side-plot about Shannon's infidelity. It adds some depth to his role, but goes absolutely nowhere.

Veteran thespians Samantha Morton and Michael Shannon lend dramatic credibility to the proceedings (even Peter Fonda shows up as the grandfather, go figure). Morton, sadly, is given the most obvious and over-the-top material, conveying a deranged caretaker in the vein of Annie Wilkes but without the depth of lunacy that Kathy Bates brought to her Oscar winning performance. Shannon is fairly subdued here, but serves as a much needed ballast to Morton's hysterics, and serves as the film's moral center. But the real dramatic anchors lie in the child performances given by Charlie Tahan and Natasha Calis. Tahan has a pasty complexion and sedated delivery befitting his bed-ridden character and Calis has a charming screen presence reminiscent of say, Shailene Woodley, or even Linda Cardellini. On the whole though, there is very little else to say about The Harvest's performances. Everyone is pretty much confined by the limiting emotionally subtlety, which I simultaneously appreciate as a thoughtful occurrence in horror, but also leaves the film a bit mute.

Upon retrospection, the director has taken a very careful execution, so as to not upset the sense of normalcy until later on in the film. There is a display of legitimate craftsmanship and attention to detail in the aspect of the boy's relationship to his 'parents'. McNaughton waits to play his hand just the right amount of time before flipping the table on his audience, but the cards he plays are surprisingly safe, almost PG-level, I'd say. I'm left engaged from the prolonged tease he plays us with, but am also left wondering, "is that it?".

The story is a preposterous one, something you'd see less drawn out and more cheesy had it been a part of a horror anthology film or even a 20-minute episode of The Twilight Zone. It is also, however, so mundane and toothless, that it would be more befitting an episode of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, or hell, even Goosebumps. The twist reveal hasn't the resolve to go to even requisite extremes to shock the audience. I appreciate a film that is as pulled-back as this one, and that deserves serious props. But . . . it's just not worth sitting through. I respect the execution in a dramatic sense. As a thriller, though, what is keeping The Harvest from recommend-ability is fulfilling the bare minimum level of thrills.