Farming today

There are bigger entities landing at your local multiplex this week. An ancient indestructible franchise is re-re-(re-)booted in Alien: Covenant. In Jawbone, it’s seconds out for yet another boxing movie. Miss Sloane is that non-staple of the repertoire, a glossy feminist thriller about public relations. Something there for almost everyone. But there’s also a low-budget British film called The Levelling, which has a very Brexit-y theme — the travails of the farming industry — so let’s pull on our wellies and have a gander.

The title alludes to the Somerset Levels, in the news in 2014 when rivers rose to drown the nether parts of southern England. ‘Save our village, dredge the river,’ says a forlorn sign in an inert wintry landscape. A mechanical digger stands sentry over the dread waterway like a rusting tyrannosaur. But there’s a more personal tragedy afoot at a farm blighted by the floods. A young farmer called Harry has died after a Rabelaisian all-night celebration. He shot himself in the lav where, behind police exclusion tape, his blood still grips the peeling wall. His grieving sister Clover returns from veterinary college, nursing a simmering rage at her old man Aubrey (full marks for all these authentic West Country names).

Aubrey’s reduced to living in a caravan, half the herd is to be sold to release capital, and any number of badgers have been furtively executed to ward off bovine TB (unsuccessfully). The prodigal daughter mucks in with milking and ditch-digging, but can’t make any headway finding out why her brother died: was it an accident or suicide? One suspects that even drunk farmers don’t mishandle shotguns in loos.

The Levelling is the debut feature of Hope Dickson Leach. Her script is as stripped to the bone as last night’s spit-roasted carcass, so clues about this failed family are hard to come by, especially as Aubrey, whose grief is subsumed into more pressing agricultural grievances, keeps changing the subject.