Harvest Lake is the new film by Scott Schirmer, a skilled U.S. filmmaker who has already demonstrated his skills in the ferocious Found and Headless, films, these, in which he was in charge of direction and production, respectively. This latest effort of his from Bandit Motion Pictures in 2016, on the other hand, is a stranger to the heinousness of the aforementioned titles in order to invade a cinematic terrain that has been too much disused in recent years-that of the horror-erotic. Schirmer's work thus steps into a context far removed from the average of today's productions and laps at extreme cinematic territories in the total absence of blood and gory sequences.
Harvest Lake is an independent film that fully respects the meanings of the term. This is a mature, full-blown production that does not suffer from its low-budget but rather succeeds in circling the attention of even the most attentive viewer to lower him or her into an imaginary world where the wildest eroticism is merely the mask of a prevailing horror.
The intentions of Schirmer, who is also a writer here, are clear from the very beginning, that is, from the very first sequences in which a beautiful young couple entertains themselves at the edge of a lake, showing their nudity without any qualms. The eroticism in Harvest Lake is immediate and strikes the viewer, making him infatuated with a lecherous and spoiled world in which the flesh is split from the spirit. At the same time, from the get-go, the film teases the viewer, offering vistas of incredible beauty and where lake, woods, and unspoiled nature lull the soul only to close irretrievably around the nefarious adventure of a group of carefree boys.
Their goliardia will soon turn into debauchery of spirit and then into lasciviousness, caused by an ancient creature living on the bottom of a lake. Precisely in this natural setting, enclosed in its frightening vastness and divorced from any connection to the modern world, Jennifer, Cat, Josh, Dan and Kevin will experience a descent with no return, into the abysses of lust, indulging in all kinds of relationships even to the orgiastic but also homosexual and lesbian types.
Schirmer does not need to explain anything and lets viewers of Harvest Lake indulge in the erotic-fantasy world, trampling their dreams with delicate eroticism and hinted horror, invisible but able to pervade every single frame of the work. Likewise, we are not given to know who the creature in the lake is or where it came from. It is, however, alive and vigilant and has been dwelling on the seabed since ancient times, constantly searching for human beings to plagiarize. With it, its surroundings have also changed and so it presents inviting natural deformations that continue to suggest explicit sexual anatomical parts oozing eroticism from every pore. These forms of vità seem to be thinking and even breathing, groaning, pulsating at the mere approach of human prey to be seduced and drawn into the universal pleasure of the flesh.
Harvest Lake is an ethereal work, constantly contrasting between eros and thanatos and managing to captivate those who indulge in it also thanks to the synthwave music composed by Adam Robl and Shawn Sutta. The atmospheric pads and clearly Eighties-esque sounds (a la It Follows to understand) are sewn onto the images to give us back fantasies that the over-30s will appreciate most.
Thus, if from the outset the reinforcing use of the score, which rises over ambient sounds at uncommon volumes, is obvious, likewise, from the outset the stage presence of Ellie Church, here grappling with an excellent acting performance, is undoubted. The entire film seems to build on the features of the blonde protagonist and her appearance as innocent as it is provocative. Likewise, the now veteran indie Tristan Risk shows us her highest erotic charge by becoming in the film synonymous with vice and sin. Schirmer is well aware of the erotic potential of his actresses and therefore, throughout the entire work, continues to offer generous close-ups of the two girls, almost always in bikinis. Finally, Jason Crowe, in the film's most abstruse role, manages to add depth to the average level of the cast by offering us a poised character, never defined and in some ways gaining parallel prominence because he is an icon of the devastation wrought by the denial of the psyche in favor of primal instincts.
Harvest Lake now becomes a major product in international filmmaking partly due to Arthur Cullipher (director of Headless), here co-producer but also supervisor of the simple yet effective special effects. Excluding the use of CGI, there is a reasonable as well as wise use of special effects in Schirmer's film consisting mainly of handcrafted creations. There is never ostentation of skill but rather a timid display of artistic creatures that, frankly, would have deserved more space in the overall duration in the work.
