Leilani Sarelle

(In French, On Cable TV, November 2022) While The Harvest is generally disappointing, it does have a few things running in its favour. No, it’s not necessarily seeing George Clooney in an early-early short appearance as a lip-synching transvestite—or even seeing the very distinctive Miguel Ferrer with a rare leading role. It’s more about the nightmarish atmosphere of seeing the protagonist being in a foreign country, then being attacked, mutilated, stuck far from home and not quite sure of what’s happening or why. Writer-director David Marconi gets far too cute with the oneiric tone toward the end (it’s one of those films that ends with mutually incompatible interpretation of whether it was a dream or not) and fails to ground The Harvest into any stakes-making reality… but he does score a few good images and sequences along the way. The protagonist-as-a-screenwriter angle is underdeveloped, but it gets the protagonist out of the country and into a sweaty erotic thriller. The film was a family affair in a few ways—Ferrer’s wife-at-the-time Leilani Sarelle plays the female lead(s), and what do you know: Clooney was Ferrer’s cousin. The single worst criticism you can levy against The Harvest is that it disintegrates: its untethered atmosphere may work at first, but it gradually becomes more frustrating, and makes the ending of the film a joke without a point. But the atmosphere? Quite a bit better than expected for a low-budget film of that calibre.