The Farm

Eerie, evocative and thrumming with tension, The Farm is abundant with conversations about family, fertility, age, tradition and truth. This finely crafted debut is a dusty road you’ll take at speed, full of twists and turns, eager to reach the inevitable, looming conclusion.

Leila and James come from totally different worlds. She’s a city girl, the only child of an angry and unpredictable single mother who died when Leila was just approaching adulthood. He’s an attentive but traditional psychologist from a small, close country family who can trace their roots in O’Connell dating back to 1840. They’ve both found what they’ve been searching for, but an unexpected diagnosis could get in the way of all their plans – moving to The Farm for a year offers the reset they both need. There, Leila plans to write, heal and process, but the reality isn’t at all what she expected. Despite people skills honed negotiating her mother’s moods and, later, deftly managing shareholders, Leila struggles to make connections – these are James’s people. Isolated with only the dog for company, she drifts in a fog of pain, loneliness and the unpredictability of an unfamiliar landscape.

Jessica Mansour-Nahra’s language is deeply physical – the smells, textures, temperature and patterns of light coalesce into a living, breathing place. Alone except for Rusty the dog, the environment itself becomes another character with which Leila struggles to connect. Vivid, unpredictable and pernicious, the landscape exerts as much external pressure as Leila’s internal anguish. Her isolation matches the loneliness of her childhood, and, like the feelings she refuses to reckon with, there is something rotten at The Farm that she cannot pinpoint. It teems with the casual violence of survival – the choices we make when we believe we have no choice, the ways we process pain, or the methods we use to numb it to get through to the next day.