The film revolves around a strange drama embodying the harvest of autumn potatoes in a small town north of Maine, while there are conflicts, challenges and romance combined.
Beneath the Harvest Sky never finds a proper balance between its two halves. They never cohere properly, and the results pitch and lurch rather than harmonize.
While the climax of Beneath the Harvest Sky is a jumble of crosscutting, thunderstorms, and an inconveniently collapsing house, the movie never loses the pulse of people and tragedies it knows too well.
A story that unfolds nearly as slowly as the potatoes ripen in the fields, the charismatic performances of the two young leads make all the difference.
Directors Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly are documentarians making their fiction debut, and they pack the movie with seemingly authentic, nitty-gritty details about life in the potato country of far northern Maine.
The performances in "Beneath the Harvest Sky" are better than the movie itself, an exceedingly derivative teen melodrama that too often loses focus and meanders off on lugubrious tangents with its criminal subplots.
