Adaptation of Sunset Song over-wrought and under told

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As its title suggests, the classic Scottish novel Sunset Song is partly an elegy, a lament for a bond between the folk and the land that is weakened by mechanization and the Great War. So, in Terence Davies's baffling new adaptation of the 1932 book by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, a mechanical thresher makes an appearance early in the film. It seems to do its job well and to provide a source of pride and pleasure for the irascible patriarch John Guthrie, a man who is otherwise miserable. The thing is, to judge from Davies's uneven and melodramatic film, there is very little to lament about the disappearance of premodern Scotland.

The British director has a taste for period pieces featuring strong women (The House of Mirth; The Deep Blue Sea) and Sunset Song is the story of its sensitive and intelligent heroine, Chris Guthrie (Agyness Deyn.) After her mother kills herself and twin babies rather than face another pregnancy, the Guthries are dispersed, leaving Chris alone with her tyrannical father (Peter Mullan). When he dies of a stroke, she finally comes into her inheritance, abandoning plans for a career as a teacher to work the family farm. She marries the sympathetic Ewan (Kevin Guthrie), but eventually, he is called to the war.

Occasionally, Davies hints at the complexities of these characters – the abusive Guthrie dearly loves his put-upon wife; the war somehow turns the gentle Ewan into a domestic monster – but mainly, they are creatures who have little to do but react to the often catastrophic events that befall them. Buffeted by life, they are a taciturn lot, which is true to their culture, and does provide lovely opportunities for the ensemble to act without speaking, from Kevin Guthrie's lovestruck Ewan to Linda Duncan McLaughlin's disapproving Aunt Janet and Simon Tait's passive country doctor. But in his script, Davies also leaves so much unsaid that not merely do motivations go unplumbed, but even the plot can be difficult to follow.

Only Chris's progress makes much sense and the hard-working Deyn is particularly winsome as both the cowed daughter and then the loving young wife. She can't, however, make much of the film's most poetic moments nor render its tragic conclusion as anything but weepy, so her character is losing an audience's sympathy by the time the credits roll.

Cinematographer Michael McDonough successfully evokes the aching beauty of the country, with its rolling hills and vast skies, but the effect is much repeated and does little to explain Chris's bond with the land. For that, Davies lifts third-person passages from the novel that he then chooses to record in Deyn's voice. So we hear Chris say of herself things such as, "Sea, sky and the folk were but a breath but the land endured … and in that moment, she felt in the gloaming that she was the land."

It's ripe to the point of bursting and, with a plot that tilts to melodrama, Davies flirts dangerously with cliché, creating an over-wrought period piece where every wheat field is bathed in golden sunlight and every childbirth is announced by chilling screams.

With its ambitious combination of romance and realism, there is something in this 20th-century classic of the Scots, something about lives lived deeply but quietly against a dramatic backdrop. But Davies mainly fails to convey that cultural observation in any way that would seem more than laughable to a 21st-century audience.