Based on a novel by Jim Crace, the Greek director makes her first English-language feature film and immerses the audience in the mud, sweat and tears of pre-industrial agriculture in a compelling way.

It’s been nine years since Athina Rachel Tsangari made her last film, “Chevalier,” a biting contemporary satire on toxic male egos and destructive dick-measuring contests. Much has changed in the Greek writer-director’s third feature, “Harvest” — her first English-language work, her first literary adaptation and in some ways her most ornate and expensive production to date, set several centuries in the past — but the theme of petty, ruinous patriarchy remains strong. Tsangari’s powerful, yeasty period piece, which follows British author Jim Crace’s award-nominated historical novel about a farming community destroyed by petty distrust and encroaching capitalism, occasionally picks up the thread of its sprawling ensemble narrative, but it’s fascinating as an immersion in another time and place.

What time and place, however, is a matter of debate. As in Crace’s novel, neither is specified, though the accents and the rugged, lush landscape—the film was shot on location in Argyllshire, Scotland—point emphatically north, when the date could be sometime in the 17th or even early 18th century: before the Industrial Revolution but after the advent of the Enclosure Acts, which privatized previously common land and ended the open-field system of the Middle Ages. The vagueness of the milieu suggests, if anything, the deep-seated customs of a community largely resistant to the passage of time, though there’s nothing vague about Nathan Parker’s impressively gruff, oxidized production design (“The Kitchen,” “I Am Not a Witch”), with its weather-worn wooden structures held together by mud, mold, and habit.

It’s when one such building—the farm’s stables—is mysteriously set alight one night that things begin to go wrong in this hitherto efficient, nameless village, setting off a long, tumultuous week of recrimination and revenge. The lord of the manor, Master Kent (a terrific Harry Melling, equal parts alpha and beta, puppy and wolf), is reluctant to use his status over the villagers harshly, instead advocating the more socialist model of land-sharing favored by his late wife, the estate’s original heir. But the people demand consequences for the fire, electing three unknown vagrants—two men and a woman—as the culprits without trial or evidence. As punishment, the men are put in the local pillory for a week; the woman, Mistress Beldam (Thalissa Teixeira), is subjected to a forced head-shaving and hissing accusations of witchcraft.