“The Harvest” is one of those movies which completely took me off guard to where I had no real idea of where it was going. This is a very rare experience for me when watching movies these days as I typically have a pretty good idea of where the story is going to end up, so that makes this particular film from John McNaughton, which represents his first directorial effort in a decade by the way, all the more effective.

The prologue of “The Harvest” is designed to mess with your head a bit, so I prefer to let audiences witness it for themselves. Past this, we come to meet Maryann (Natasha Calis), a young girl who has just moved into her grandparents’ house following the death of her parents. This causes her great discomfort because, aside from losing her mom and dad, she is forced to start all over again in a new town where she is forced to make new friends again. Having been uprooted myself at such a young age, I can confirm this is a real inconvenience.

Eventually however, Maryann does make a new friend in Andy (Charlie Tahan), a very sick young boy who is confined to his home twenty-four hours and seven days a week, and he cannot move around without a wheelchair. Andy is constantly looked after by his parents, Katherine (Samantha Morton) and Richard (Michael Shannon), who are both constantly in conflict over how to best take care of him. Katherine is a doctor who constantly keeps Andy in a medicated state, and Richard constantly urges her to ease up and not overdo it. Suffice to say, these two people do not have the same relationship they had when they first wed.

Now that is all I want to tell you about the plot. What I can say tell you from here is that Maryann comes to make certain discoveries which turn hers and Andy’s life completely upside down. Watching a movie like “The Harvest” is la lot ice peeling away at an onion; you keep going through various layers in order to get to the center of things, and McNaughton and screenwriter Stephen Lancellotti reveal only so much as they keep stringing us along to the very end. Before we get to the revelation at the story’s core, we dare not take our eyes off the screen for a single second.

It was really great to see Samantha Morton here as she gives “The Harvest” its best performance. As Katherine, she gives a very multi-layered performance as we watch her go from being understanding and caring to becoming very uptight and furiously angry. When Morton stares down Calis in one scene, it makes for an incredibly tense moment as Morton looks like a snake just waiting to strike. Her’s is a very impressive performance as well as the kind which is not always found in horror movies. You are never sure whether to empathize with Katherine or fear her presence, and this proves to be a reminder of how powerful an actress Morton can be.

Michael Shannon is one of the best character actors working today and, as Richard, he has to play an emotionally muted character of sorts. At first, it seems like Shannon is doing too little onscreen, but the reason for Richard’s emotional numbness does become clear as the movie goes on. This is the kind of role where most actors get self-conscious and feel like they are not acting enough. Shannon, however, does not make this mistake, and it makes for another one of the many compelling performances we have come to expect from him.

McNaughton is the same filmmaker who gave us the feel-good movie of 1990, “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.” Trust me when I say I am not even going to bother comparing “The Harvest” to it because the one which famously starred Michael Rooker is a one-of-a-kind horror film which is hard to top in terms of bleak realism. “The Harvest,” in comparison, is more of a dark fairy tale that gets darker as it goes on, and it shows how gifted McNaughton is at creating suspense and maintaining it throughout a feature film.

Seriously, when you look at McNaughton’s resume, his work has never been merely confined to the one genre. He gave us the comedy-drama “Mad Dog and Glory” which had Robert De Niro, Bill Murray and Uma Thurman giving some of their most underrated performances ever, the erotic thriller “Wild Things” which did not even try to hide how gleefully trashy it was any more than it hid Kevin Bacon’s penis on the silver screen , the concert film of Eric Bogosian’s “Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll,” and the crime drama “Lansky” which starred Richard Dreyfuss as the famous gangster of the same name. While it may be understandable how many are unable to get past “Henry” as that film left a gaping psychological scar on those who sat all the way through it, McNaughton has managed to go from one genre to the next in a way audiences do not easily recognize. This makes him quite an underrated filmmaker.

Now “The Harvest” does have its flaws, some of which come from it being an understandably low budget production. The pacing could have been strengthened, and we just have to get that one scene where a child tells the truth of what is going on and quickly get rebuffed for no sane reason. It is always infuriating to me when adults quickly dismiss their children’s explanations as hooey because, from one generation to the next, the young ones still see right through their parents’ hypocrisy. Also, this movie ends on a note which leaves too many questions unanswered. Granted, I am all for ambiguous endings in movies, but the one “The Harvest” gives us does not provide much in the way of benefits.

All the same, I admired what McNaughton was able to pull off with here, and “The Harvest” kept my attention from start to finish. It always seems difficult to pull off such a suspenseful thriller these days, but he does accomplish his task here. There is also no forgetting Morton’s complex and frightening performance as a mother desperate to protect her child. Whatever you think of this movie, her work will stay with you for a time once the end credits have finished.

* * * out of * * * *