Dark River

It's a sad story of family trauma and an attempt to go home many years later. The photography is superb. The acting is powerful. It works very well as a film overall. I don't want to say any more at the risk of spoiling it for you if you haven't yet seen it but it is well worth watching.

As for the negative reviews, I suggest you ignore them. This was never intended to be a super-hero action movie. It's a drama and it does what it sets out to do very well.

There's no question Ruth Wilson has superb charisma on screen and her co-star Mark Stanley is excellent as well, but this film gives the viewer, in my opinion, little room to "come up for air", as the storyline is just relentlessly dark and bleak. I thought the writer and director here Clio Bernard's 2013 movie The Selfish Giant was powerful and memorable, but her latest film is just too muddled and depressing for my tastes.

Ruth Wilson puts in a strong performance in 'Dark River', playing a young farmer who inherits her family's troubled legacy. She's good, but the film never completely escapes its "grim up north" sensibility, as a story unfolds of unmitigated harshness in a world inhabited only the by the terminally taciturn. One can credit the writers for not tossing in a throwaway romance; but without hope, it's hard to sustain the interest of the audience.

It is COVID-19 "stay at home" time, I found this movie on the Kanopy streaming site through my public library. Very English, I had to turn on the captions to be able to understand much of the dialog.

Although I haven't seen a lot of her work I am a big Ruth Wilson fan. About 34-ish here she plays Alice Bell, working for someone on their sheep farm. Then she gets word that her father had died so she travels there to stake her claim for the tenancy for her family's sheep farm but immediately meets resistance from her brother who hasn't been taking very good care of the place.

Alice had left home some 15 years earlier, and in flashbacks we are shown that she suffered from abuse by her father. She still had visions that he was there at times. Most of the story is about Alice and her brother locking horns and struggling to find the best course of action through this difficult situation. She wants to revive the farm, he wants to liquidate and take off with the profits.

Its rating is about right, it is a well made and well acted drama but without much joy.

This gets right down into the roots of northern farming. A great cast and exceptional performances from Ruth Wilson and Mark Stanley, who play siblings at loggerheads.

The film itself is quite dark. Everyday is pretty much grey and dull to fit the mood for the film. It's filmed beautifully, exactly what you would expect in the lovely northern countryside.

I really enjoyed the story, I felt it got deep down into a family feud that included abuse and regret. Very well written.