Hope Dickson Leach’s excellent debut feature The Levelling is a superbly shot and piercingly acted realist tragedy, like a really disturbing folk horror movie with the horror amputated, so that only the folk remains. Or maybe the horror is, in fact, left in place, the real horror that was there all along, more disturbing than exotic fantasies about Wicker Men, the day-to-day reality about where food comes from and in what circumstances, in an industry that has until now been widely supported by EU subsidy, in a countryside whose beauty is not charming or picturesque, but menacing, uncompromising, unforgiving.
The director has said that she was inspired by European film-makers such as the Dardenne brothers and Bruno Dumont, and that’s apparent: but she seems to have channelled more Anglo-Saxon energies, those of Ben Wheatley or Sam Peckinpah, and applied them to a quite different drama. It makes The Levelling seem like the kind of film in which all the disquieting mood setting and establishing shots seem to be leading up to some jump-scare that recedes over the horizon. What remains is scary enough.
The title means the film’s setting, the Somerset levels, but there are echoes of the 17th-century agitators and pamphleteers: the levellers, harbingers of retribution in which the high and mighty will be reduced to the level of those on whose labour they have exalted themselves. And of course the title refers to the great levelling itself: the appearance in everyone’s life of that agricultural nightmare: the grim reaper. The Levelling begins with what appears to be a classic moment of horror: glimpses of a party or sinister bacchanal that has got out of control. We see flashes from flaming torches, faces subliminally illuminated, animal and bird noises that could ambiguously be cries of pain.
In the cold light of day, we later see the wrecked farmyard in which the party took place. Clover (Ellie Kendrick) is the first-year vet student who has just arrived back at the family home, to be confronted by this scene and also her father Aubrey (David Troughton), who like his daughter is devastated. Because Clover has come for what is to be a funeral – her brother, who had just been given the farm, died at this party in what Aubrey is still insisting was a shotgun accident. The farm is itself is a chaotic ruin, effectively destroyed by the floods some years ago, and there has been no insurance payout. Aubrey is living in an almost equally squalid caravan, drinking heavily and dealing with the livestock as best he can. As Clover stays to sort things out for the funeral, she makes escalatingly horrible discoveries.
It is a really outstanding performance from Kendrick: fiercely intelligent, serious, real. She is the centre of the film, and her gaze – at once profoundly alienated and yet shrewdly knowledgeable and perceptive, understanding what she sees in ways that elude the people who are still here – is the centre of the movie. Clover has tellingly decided to become a vet; to some extent she has been shaped and influenced by this place, but she does not want to become tied to this or any other farm. More importantly, she is a vegetarian, a life choice that divides her from the family she left behind. A kindly neighbour has made Aubrey and Clover some shepherd’s pie and Clover declines the suggestion that she “just eat the potato” because that has been cooked with the meat. Yet her stance is to change.
Toughly real images of milking and driving the cows are interspersed with brilliant, in fact, visionary moments. We see a hare swimming and it is skin-crawlingly strange: a closeup on the eyes is a reminder of the impregnable enigma of the animal’s gaze – implacable, unknowable. It is a kind of realist hallucination, although I should say the starling murmuration sequence is now in danger of becoming a cliche. When Clover is out in the fields, the family dog dives into the flooded ponds, and, transported by a kind of suicidal hysteria, Clover climbs in as well, to save the dog or to save herself or to make a panicky stand against imminent disaster. The film’s final moments are coolly ambiguous: an emotional release, a moment of acceptance, or a terrible surrender to the darkness. It’s not clear. The Levelling stays with you like a remembered dream.
