4 stars

This is an impressive, subtle drama that was invited to Critics Week at Cannes in 2017 and has subsequently appeared at French film festivals. An unusual piece made by relatively unknown talent, it could easily have disappeared from view, but it has turned up on streaming services.

It is good to see a film about the travails of a young French dairy farmer resurface in this accessible way, because it is terrific filmmaking featuring a fine central performance by Swann Arlaud. As it turns out, three years after it was released, Petit Paysan is timely and topical as well.

The writer-director Hubert Charuel grew up on his parents' dairy farm but he quit the land to study film at the prestigious French film school, La Femis, in Paris. This, a first feature that was filmed on the family farm, is likely to contain a lot of autobiographical elements.

At the age of 35, Pierre (Arlaud) has sole responsibility of the family farm and its top-ranked herd. He has an exacting milking schedule and of an evening, has dinner with his retired parents who still live on the property, or eats alone in front of the screen.

Conversation with an equable dad and difficult-to-please mum (Isabel Candelier) is entertainingly combative and packed with rueful insights, like so many of the interchanges between Pierre and the other characters in his world. A sceptical gendarme, the bunch of burly mates he never has time to socialise with, the Belgian dairy farmer he watches on YouTube, and the pretty, dimpled baker his mother wants him to pair up with.

The screenplay by Charuel and co-writer Claude le Pape brims with humour and insight into its cast of characters.

Pierre has just learned over the internet that entire dairy herds have been put down after they were found to be suffering from a highly infectious disease, a dorsal haemorrhagic fever. He is starting to freak out at this news, even though events in Charente are some distance away.

Without overplaying its hand, Petit Paysan displays some inspired cinematic touches that reflect Pierre's state of mind. From the surrealist dream sequence of him asleep while his cows are milling around inside his house, to the thriller tropes that come into play when lives are dispatched in the barn.

Pierre's sensible, down-to-earth sister, Pascale (Sara Giraudeau, also marvellous), is a local vet. He calls her in to check on Topaz, one of his Friesians who is with calf. She hasn't been herself lately. Both Pascale and her assistant dismiss it as a case of mastitis, brought on by E-coli infection.

Like the bracing and unsentimental exchanges between Pierre and his parents, the exchanges between him and his sister are just as salty, brisk and amusing. Pascale is disinclined to take her brother's early concerns as seriously as she might, and is clearly exasperated.

Pierre has phoned her 15 times, in perhaps as many minutes. Why should she respond in a timely fashion when Pierre's behaviour is becoming stranger by the day? Yet there is a suggestion that for all Pascale's learned experience, Pierre's lived experience is on the money this time. Anyway, he knows his beloved cows best. The next day, when he strokes Topaz along the spine, his hand comes away smeared with blood. Yes, she has it, 'DHF', the 'Belgian disease'.

As Pierre takes desperate action under the cover of night, the suspense grows as we find ourselves with some sympathy for the young farmer who is in fact breaking the law. His elderly neighbour may have witnessed something, so Pierre coaches him in the correct response. Should someone ask, it's "something that stinks but we don't know what".

Trapped between family loyalty and professional ethics, Pascale inevitably becomes compromised by what she knows, and she and Pierre try to send their parents away on holiday in Corsica so they won't suspect anything.

It's a debacle that only makes sense in the context of Pierre's dread of losing his entire herd, his reputation and his livelihood, and has some resonance with the strange times we find ourselves in.

Petit Paysan is a quiet achievement, with characters that live on after the credits roll.