Review: Dark River

A familiar tale of childhood trauma lingering into adulthood, Dark River is buoyed by intense and committed performances from Ruth Wilson and Mark Stanley as estranged siblings who now find themselves in a property dispute.

Loosely based on Rose Tremain's novel, Trespass, the film begins with Wilson's Alice Bell learning of her father's (Sean Bean) death. Working as a seasonal sheep shearer, she's friendly but guarded and the prospect of returning home is one that clearly troubles her. It doesn't take too long to discover the root of her paralytic anxiety. Flashbacks reveal that her father sexually abused her; arriving at the family home, a tenant farm in North Yorkshire, she barely lasts five minutes inside before seeing a glimpse of her father at the top of the stairs. This is too haunted and decaying a home, yet this is the legacy promised to her and she is determined to claim it.

Her brother Joe (Stanley) is not well pleased at her homecoming, even less so when she applies for tenancy, which would effectively grant her control. She's been gone 15 long years, during which he had to care for their ailing father as well as the demands of running the farm. It's all too clear that he has been overwhelmed by both and, in her absence, he has become hardened with bitterness and resentment. There's no other way for their conflict to end but in violence, it's just a matter of when and how.

This is writer-director Clio Barnard's third feature, and there is no denying that she is a remarkable talent with mood and acute in the way the past is always bleeding into the present. The manner in which she presents Bean is particularly effective - he is hardly onscreen and yet he is an incredibly indelible presence. Yet there's something oppressively generic about the film and a certain over-reliance on paralleling the internal roilings of Alice and Joe with the restlessness of nature and the land. The inevitable tragedy, considering the care taken by Barnard in its lead-up, feels contrived and almost sloppy. Yet it's redeemed by the final, near-wordless moment shared by the central duo that best conveys how powerful Dark River can be when it focuses on two people coming to terms with the abuse that tore them apart.

Dark River

Directed by: Clio Barnard

Written by: Clio Barnard; based on the novel Trespass by Rose Tremain

Starring: Ruth Wilson, Mark Stanley, Sean Bean, Esme Creed-Miles, Aiden McCullough