Alice Bell (Ruth Wilson) is a lonely laborer at a sheep farm. After getting news of her father's death, she returns to her family's rundown sheep farm despite being haunted by a family secret. Her bitter brother Joe (Mark Stanley) is angry at her 15 years absence and her attempt to revive the farm. He has plans to sell the stock and abandon the tenancy.This is dark, bleak, brooding, and not that exceptional. It's all grindingly dark and brooding. The dialogue is sparse. There isn't much surprising. Wilson is able to portray this darkness. It would be nice to have more. It's all one note and oppressively depressing.

This is one dreary flick. after 15 years away, a woman goes back to the life which brought here total unhappiness. nothing has changed.

If it had a better script, a better telling of the story and a better director this could have been a great film, instead it is just a farming fighting siblings plod along, sometimes hard to understand the accents, and with a lot of films that don't actually tell you what going to happen, but you can sort of work it out, well with this there is no working out, the whole story line is flawed, and there is not enough dialogue to help you understand the full story. Shame really Ruth Wilson does a fantastic job, if one did not know better she could have been that person, and not a film star, the rest of the cast did what they had to do with such a bad script...........Great scenery, mostly filmed i think in North Yorkshire.

A Yorkshire farm family lives out a curse as harsh and ineluctable as a Greek tragedy. The life here is elemental. There are threats of fire and purges in rain. The living quarters are primitive, dark, basic. The men are rough-hewn and violent. The sex is brief, impersonal and urgent. The only modern device is the buzzing shearer. When the guard dog breaks its tether it straightaway mauls a sheep, what it was supposed to protect. This is no Wonderland that this Alice ploughs through, stolid and capable. We see her shear and dip sheep efficiently as a man. For dinner she skins and guts a rabbit, but is drawn from its domestic cooking by her brother Joe's drunken aberrancy. She has to fight off his attempt to burn her Range Rover. As Alice, Ruth Wilson is most expressive in her harrowing silences. The primeval sin is the father's habitual violation of the young Alice. He is all the more sinister for his gentle, tender mien. He didn't need Joe's violence. In shame and anger, Alice spent 15 years working sheep farms wherever she could find them, before her father's death enabled her return. As Joe notes, she is still frightened anew every time she enters a room. Her father haunts her still. And yet.... She has to return to the land. She draws on her father's promise to leave it to her, however poisoned it is by her experience. She applies for its tenancy. She fights Joe in an attempt to bring her new savvy to the operation. Ultimately she loses when he wins the tenancy on the promise to sell out to a developer. The Joe we see is a drunken incompetent lout with his father's male authority. He is violent but has no sand. For he is as scarred by his father's sin as Alice is. He doesn't realize that until she spells it out: "Why didn't you stop him?" His rage and self-destruction are based in that guilt. Joe gets his redemption at the end. He assumes the guilt for the murder Alice accidentally committed. Finally he protects her. Both are strengthened by this cleansing, the confrontation of their curse. So the film closes on an idyllic shot of the two siblings, as teenagers, walking out of the shadowed barn down into their realm of shining fields. It's probably not a memory but a metaphor for the relationship they have now snatched away from their father's shadow. The title has no literal representation in the film. It's antithetic to the waterfall in which Alice twice goes to cleanse herself. Another generation of teens repair there too, possibly without her curse to ablute. The dark river is the family's secret guilt that has rushed through their lives ever since.