'Bitter Harvest'

In cinemas February 24th!

We are between World Wars. Millions of Ukrainians fall victim to Stalin’s “death-by-starvation” program known as the Holodomor, which ultimately killed between seven to ten million Ukrainians.

We follow a young Ukrainian artist named Yuri (Max Irons) during this genocidal time in his homeland, trying to help his village survive famine and slaughter by the Bolshevik army. Driven to join the resistance and becoming the fighter his father wanted him to be, Yuri overcomes imprisonment and torture to join his childhood sweetheart in the fight for a free Ukraine.
Violent and brutal, the setting of 'Bitter Harvest’ gets under the skin. The futile attempts by harmless farmers to fight off the Bolshevik forces taking their food are made even more gut-wrenching when you see the utter disregard the Bolsheviks have for Ukrainian lives; in one scene, running a woman over with their horses as if she was mere dirt in the street just because she couldn’t get out of the way quickly enough.

Max Irons as Yuri, Samantha Barks as his childhood sweetheart Natalka and Terence Stamp as his grandfather Ivan all try their best with what they are given, but ultimately the material fails them as it jumps into the dreaded pool of melodrama right from the start and never manages to escape it. Overly dramatic performances are made worse by certain editing choices, resulting in borderline ridiculous scenes. The dialogue is cringe worthy and even went as far as eliciting laughter from the audience on several occasions. What should have been highly emotional scenes came across as farcical. The clichéd and forced narrative never allows the audience to connect with the characters. The script almost ends up undoing what the film is trying to achieve, shining light on an atrocity that has so far gone unnoticed by the world. The cue cards at the end made me more emotional than the entire film I had seen prior.

The saving grace of 'Bitter Harvest', aside from its vitally important premise, is its cinematography. Milsome beautifully captures the lush tranquillity of the village the film opens with as well as the desolate hopelessness later on. His cinematography was the absolute highlight of the film for me.
Overall 'Bitter Harvest' filled me with regret and sadness. Not, as intended, due to witnessing millions of people starving to death, but the waste of opportunity at giving this important story the attention it deserves. I want this film to be great, to be a must see showcase of what happened, but I feel it does a disservice to this rather important event in history. The overly melodramatic script is its undoing, eliciting laughter where gravitas should reign. 'Bitter Harvest' doesn’t come close to the epic it wants to be, and wanting to be that epic ultimately sets it up to fail. Kudos to Mendeluk for bringing this story and its events to the big screen. I just can’t help but wish for better execution in bringing this story to life.

I wish I could recommend this film given the importance of its content. I would have given it only one star if not for that. Yet ultimately 'Bitter Harvest' falls bitterly short.

Review by Melanie Radloff.

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