The secret daughter of a woman living in a Canadian town dominated by an antiquated sect goes out for revenge in this lurid pagan thriller
Canadian writer-director Thomas Robert Lee’s follow up to his little-known debut Empyrean, Blood Harvest simmers with unease and lingers in the mind – but bites off more than it can chew, leaving a little too much undigested narrative food for thought behind. That said, there’s quite a bit of lusty scenery-chomping on offer from the cast, giving this a charming luridness that could generate a small cult following.
For reasons that are never entirely clear (and which suggest there was a major whittling down of ideas before the last script drafts or final edits), Lee posits a fictitious religious community in the Canadian prairie who all wear Amish-style antiquated 19th-century garb and speak with the
Irish accents of their ancestors, even though the year is 1973. While almost all the townsfolk cleave to a version of Church of
Ireland Protestantism, Agatha Earnshaw (Catherine Walker), a single woman living both literally and figuratively on the edge of the community, has gone all in for some kind of pagan blood magic cult with a coven of crones quite separate from the town.