The Old Man And The Land

What do we know about the old man (Roger Marten)? He’s bound to the land, somehow a part of it, in a way that the younger generation cannot understand. Even Laura (Emily Beecham), who describes herself as having farming in her blood, who assumed that she would be his heir until she grew old enough to realise that she was a woman and what that meant, cannot embody it the way he does; her troubled brother David (Rory Kinnear) even less so. So they watch, and we watch, and we never hear the old man speak directly. He expresses himself through the land, its arduous cultivation, its slow giving up of treasure.

There is little by way of direct conversation in Nicholas Parish’s slowly yielding film. Viewers, too, must be patient and wait for their rewards – but like the old man, we are sometimes caught be surprise, confronted with sudden moments of exquisite beauty. Shimmering blades of grass as the sun rises. A bright puddle in a sea of mud. A half moon in a daylight sky, suspended above a field that seems to go on forever. These are moment one can get lost in.

Parish doesn’t allow the romance of it to get in the way of reality. It’s a hard life, and one which can call for hard decisions. It shapes people in a certain way, but perhaps the old man’s brutality has gone beyond that. He’s sober now, at least. David isn’t. We hear his pleas for money in long answering machine messages. We also hear his thanks, so know that it has been sent. perhaps the old man recognises something of his own past failures there. Perhaps it’s easier than providing love. We hear the angry messages, when David has blown it all on drink again and phones up, knowing that his father will be in bed, to shout at him about the unfairness of things that happened long ago.

Tensions have been simmering within the family for years about what will happen to the farm after the old man’s death. David is afraid that Laura will take it from him, his ‘birthright’ as he calls it. She’s worried about her brother, pleading with their father not to subsidise him anymore. When she visits, we hear the siblings argue as we watch a car, presumably with the two of them inside it, driving through thick mist, leaving broad tracks in the muddy ground.

It feels forced at times. Perhaps that’s inevitable – but it’s an interesting experiment and one well suited to the subject matter. Parish does not try to make it completely naturalistic. in time, he successfully builds up a sense of momentum, but first he forces us to accept the slower pace of country life. Sometimes we’re just left to look at the faces of the sheep as they do sheep stuff, and it’s hard not to conclude that they have a more sensible approach to life, and perhaps it’s proximity to that that makes all this worth it. Whenever it falters, the film is supported by his beguiling cinematography. The old man’s secret might be something that it takes a lifetime to grasp, but we catch glimpses, and there’s magic enough in that.

The Old Man And The Land screened as part of the 2024 Glasgow Film Festival.