Terence Davies, who made his name with a poetic recollection of his own violent childhood in Distant Voices, Still Lives, returns to the subject of patriarchal violence and its inexorable transfer from one generation to the next in this adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's 1932 novel of rural Scotland before and after World War I.
Ostensibly, the story centres on young Chris (Agyness Dean), a paler version of Hardy's Tess, who dreams of bettering herself with books and finally escaping the croft.
But it is the men – her furious father (Peter Mullan) and battle-scarred husband (Kevin Guthrie) – whose cursed natures stand in riveting contrast to the burnished beauty of the natural world around them.
As a saga, the film waxes and wanes, but Davies' feel for the painterly landscape and the exquisite construction of whatever is within his frame never wavers.