By Adam Nayman

A lot of peaches were harmed in the making of Sophie Jarvis’ Until Branches Bend, in which an Okanagan Eden gets infested from the inside-out. After discovering a mysterious bug inside some recently picked fruit, Robin (Grace Glowicki) raises the alarm with her boss and finds herself ostracized by a community whose economy depends on the annual harvest. The whistleblower-to-pariah pipeline is almost as swift here as it was in Jaws (1975). Tweak the story a few degrees and it’d be an out-and-out creature feature—a Canadian version of The Swarm (1978), at last—but, making her feature debut, Jarvis opts instead for small-town realism laced judiciously (and not ineffectively) with psych-horror effects: shock cuts, moody music, and an increasingly twisted subjectivity.  The script’s decision to double Robin’s paranoid disgust at an encroaching, invasive species with an internal biological crisis gives the movie some thematic ballast—maybe a bit too much, in the end. The MVP is Glowicki, who’s got the alert, aggrieved presence of a reluctant Chicken Little, and her scenes with Alexandra Roberts, as her spiritually unmoored younger sister, evince convincing sibling tension.

Adam Nayman