Film

The Levelling

A young woman returns to her family's failing Somerset farm after her brother's death, inheriting not just the land but the weight of her father's grief and her own unresolved past. It's a quietly devastating portrait of rural decline and familial fracture—intimate, unsparing, and anchored by a performance of real vulnerability. For anyone who responds to slow-burn dramas about people trapped by circumstance and legacy.

TMDb rating3.1

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you like slow, observational British cinema where the landscape and a strained family do the talking, and you don't mind a story that trusts silence to carry its grief.

Skip it if the pace is glacial and the mood stays muted throughout, so if you need plot momentum, this will test your patience.

What it asks of you: Eighty-odd minutes of unhurried scenes and sparse talk, where the weather, the land and people's faces do more work than the plot.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Lady Macbeth2016

Katherine Scott Thomas is electrifying as a trapped woman whose quiet fury explodes into something dangerous. It has the same claustrophobic intensity and moral ambiguity, with stunning cinematography that makes rural bleakness feel almost Gothic.

But The pacing is glacial, and the violence—when it comes—is genuinely upsetting rather than cathartic. It demands patience and emotional stamina.

Lady Macbeth poster

A Prophet2009

A masterpiece about inherited limitation and the slow, grinding corruption of the soul. Like The Levelling, it's unflinching about how circumstance shapes us, and it builds its power through long, quiet scenes of accumulating dread.

But It's a prison drama that can feel relentless and hopeless. Two and a half hours of watching someone's humanity erode is not everyone's idea of a night out.

A Prophet poster

Godless2017

A western run by women in a dying mining town, where family obligation and personal survival are always in collision. Same tensions about duty, inheritance, and the slow death of a way of life, but with different genre tools.

But It's a miniseries that takes time to establish its world, and the supernatural elements some find intriguing others find unnecessary. Uneven in places.

Godless poster

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from The Levelling

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Aftersun2022

Both are about unspoken grief within families, and the specific helplessness of loving someone you cannot reach or save.

A father and daughter on holiday, shot through the haze of memory and regret. Like The Levelling, it's about the unbridgeable gaps within families—but it's formal, dreamlike, and uses visual abstraction where The Levelling uses devastating realism. A completely different register, same emotional core.

But It's very much a 'text-over-subtext' kind of film where you construct meaning from fragments. The father's depression is never named, never explained. Many will find it moving; others will find it frustratingly withheld.

Aftersun poster
More like this (4)

Under the Skin2014

Scarlett Johansson in perhaps the most emotionally desolate film ever made. It's about isolation and disconnection—the feeling of being fundamentally separate from the world around you—shot with hypnotic, haunting precision.

But It has almost no dialogue, barely a plot, and some scenes of graphic violence. It's challenging in ways that require genuine commitment from the viewer.

Under the Skin poster

Winter's Bone2010

Jennifer Lawrence as a girl holding her fractured family together through pure will. It's about rural poverty, family loyalty, and the specific weight of responsibility that falls on young shoulders—thematically very close to The Levelling.

But The Ozark setting and meth-cooking subplot can feel like a crime thriller waiting to happen, but the film deliberately refuses genre satisfaction. Some find that restraint admirable; others find it slow.

Winter's Bone poster

The Souvenir2019

Honor Swinton Byrne as a young art student whose life is gradually colonised by a controlling older man. Like The Levelling, it's about the creeping realisation that you cannot save someone, and the cost of trying.

But It's deliberately oblique about its central relationship, and the narrative is deliberately fragmented. If you need clarity and traditional dramatic beats, it will frustrate you.

The Souvenir poster

Catch Me Daddy2015

A young woman fleeing her family's controlling grip. It shares The Levelling's DNA—a young woman at the breaking point between duty and self-preservation, filmed with raw, unfiltered intensity.

But It's a brutal film that doesn't look away from violence or humiliation. It's also something of a cult film, which means it can be harder to access and discuss than mainstream work.

Catch Me Daddy poster

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Recommended by

God's Own Country, Akenfield, Catch Me Daddy