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Ghost Canyon

'Dark River' [Blu-ray]
(Ruth Wilson, Mark Stanley, Sean Bean, Dean Andrews, Mike Noble, et al / Blu-ray / NR / (2017) 2019 / FilmRise)

Overview: Following the death of her father, Alice (Ruth Wilson) returns to her home village for the first time in 15 years, to claim the tenancy to the family farm she believes is rightfully hers.

Blu-ray Verdict: SPOILERS AHEAD! - Starring one of my most favorite British actors, the delicious and mysteriously alluring Ruth Wilson ('Luther'), 'Dark River' tells the story of a Yorkshire farm family living out a curse as harsh and ineluctable as any known Greek tragedy.

The life here is elemental. There are threats of fire and purges in rain. The living quarters are primitive, dark, basic. The men are rough-hewn and violent. The sex is brief, impersonal and urgent.

Indeed, the only modern device is the buzzing shearer for the sheep. When the guard dog breaks its tether it straightaway mauls a sheep; the one thing it was meant to protect.

Ergo, this is no Wonderland that Alice (Wilson) ploughs through, stolid and capable. We see her shear and dip sheep efficiently as any man. For dinner she skins and guts a rabbit, but is drawn from her bout of domestic cooking by her brother Joe's drunken aberrancy. Furthermore, she has to then fight off his attempt to burn her Range Rover.

As Alice, Ruth Wilson is most expressive in her harrowing silences. The primeval sin is the father's habitual violation of the young Alice. He is all the more sinister for his gentle, tender mien.

He didn't need Joe's violence. In shame and anger, Alice spent 15 years working sheep farms wherever she could find them, before her father's death enabled her return.

As Joe notes, she is still frightened anew every time she enters a room. Her father haunts her still. And yet she now has to return to the land.

Drawing on her father's promise to leave it to her, however poisoned it is by her experience she applies for its tenancy - and then has to confront (and fight) Joe in an attempt to bring her new savvy to the operation.

Ultimately she loses when he wins the tenancy on the promise to sell out to a developer. The Joe we now see is a drunken incompetent lout with his father's male authority. He is violent but has no true guile for he is as scarred by his father's sin as Alice is.

He doesn't realize that until she spells it out: "Why didn't you stop him?" His rage and self-destruction are based in that guilt. That said, Joe gets his redemption at the end when he assumes the guilt for the murder Alice accidentally committed.

So he finally protects her and both are strengthened by this cleansing; the confrontation of their curse. The film closes on an idyllic shot of the two siblings, as teenagers, walking out of the shadowed barn down into their realm of shining fields.

It's probably not a memory, per say, but a metaphor for the relationship they have now snatched away from their father's shadow. The title has no literal representation in the film but is more antithetic to the waterfall in which Alice twice goes to cleanse herself.

Another generation of teens repair there too, possibly without her curse adhered to themselves though. Indeed, the dark river is the family's secret guilt that has rushed through their lives ever since. But no longer. This is a Widescreen Presentation (1.85:1) enhanced for 16x9 TVs.

www.filmrise.com





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