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An eventful week in the waning days of a medieval English village provides the narrative backbone for Harvest, Athina Rachel Tsangari’s moody-verging-on-mopish adaptation of Jim Crace’s novel of the same name. The book is written in a bewitching prose style somewhere between a monologue and a first-person essay. Dialogue is sparse, much of it denoted as overheard half-phrases, and the overall ambience alien, which is more than apt for a setting—a lord-of-the-manor-ruled agricultural collective—effectively lost to time.

Tsangari, who co-wrote the screenplay with Joslyn Barnes, finds her own way into this foreign land by accentuating the grit and the grime. This is evident in everything from Sean Price Williams’s grainy 16mm cinematography (some sort of crud is always visible at the edges of the frame) to the lead casting of Caleb Landry Jones, a performer who often seems like he’s just emerged dazed and confused from primordial sludge.

Greek writer-director-producer Athina Rachel Tsangari’s last feature was 2015’s Chevalier, a sly black comedy skewering masculine hyper-competitiveness which built on the promise of her first two acclaimed works, Attenberg (2010) and The Slow Business of Going (2000). Those put her on the cutting edge of the Greek Weird Wave along with her compatriot Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things), whose early work she often produced. Now Tsangari returns to Venice, where Attenberg made such a splash, with Harvest, a work of marked maturity and sobriety — less weird than woebegone and woad-tinted, based on the acclaimed novel of the same name by Jim Crace. The result is a moving if willfully ahistorical study of an agrarian paradise lost.

Like Crace’s book, Harvest the film never specifies when and where the story takes place. However, the Scottish accents of the ensemble, which range from Glaswegian to the more northerly, teuchter cadences of the Highlands proper,...