A mesmerising exercise in Lynchian weirdness and English folk horror, Ben Wheatley’s latest project cements his claim as British cinema’s most promising genre talent. Though there’s very little in the way of the usual horror trappings, the terror here is all in the mind, as befits a film made on a shoestring budget and confined to a (more or less) single location. The film’s multi-platform release – simultaneously in cinemas, online, on DVD & blu-ray, and the Film4 television channel – has at the very least given it a degree of exposure it could never have hoped to achieve under normal circumstances, which means Wheatley’s star should now ascend even further.
Taking its cue from a period in history when the old order of things was collapsing and new ways of thinking were emerging, A FIELD IN ENGLAND captures a moment when chaos and fear reigned supreme. Set in an unremarkable, unspecified part of the country, nobleman’s lackey Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) flees the scene of a Civil War battle and joins up (somewhat reluctantly) with three others (Julian Barratt, Peter Ferdinando and Ryan Pope), who decide they too have had enough of fighting their countrymen. It’s not long before they are all recruited by the vaguely sinister Irishman O’Neil (a brilliantly malevolent Michael Smiley), a man who clearly knows a thing or two about the dark arts, to find some treasure buried underground, though its exact contents are never revealed.
The director and writing partner/co-editor Amy Jump draw heavily from the tradition of English, and specifically East Anglian, folklore. This is after all the region that gave rise to both the revolutionary Oliver Cromwell and the infamous witchfinder Matthew Hopkins – men who made their reputations by tearing down normality – as well as MR James, the greatest ghost story writer of them all. The sense of ordinary life being temporarily suspended as communities and families are torn apart by the conflict is mirrored in the film’s plot; the four men escape from a battlefield through a hedgerow into a neighbouring field that may or may not be a different dimension. From there, in true Twilight Zone-style, things only get stranger.
…If you can stare at the screen throughout the climactic trippy visuals, you’re doing well
Wheatley delivers one arresting image after another, making a virtue of the stark black and white photography. In isolation they may not make much sense, but together they infuse the story with a sense of otherworldliness; never more so than when Whitehead emerges from O’Neil’s tent, having undergone some sort of (unseen) horrific ordeal. Tied to a rope, he almost floats past his companions, the rope suspended behind him like an astronaut’s safety tether. O’Neil’s own arrival earlier is even more mysterious: literally wound on to the screen from a seemingly invisible hole.
Time seems to slow down and speed up. The main characters pose in tableau-style at the start of certain scenes, recalling manuscript illustrations from the middle ages. Are they frozen in time, unable to move? Or is this time as seen from their perspective? When mushrooms from the field get eaten later on, Wheatley and Jump take the opportunity to go wild in the editing suite; if you can stare at the screen throughout the climactic trippy visuals, you’re doing well.
A FIELD IN ENGLAND nods to earlier films that tackled the same period, like WITCHFINDER GENERAL and BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW, but succeeds in carving its own path too. It doesn’t offer many answers, and it demands a certain degree of patience from its audience, but this oblique trip to the past delivers the weird and unworldly goods.
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The English Civil War stands right at the end of the time of Mediaeval thinking, right at the beginning of the Enlightenment. At its best FIELD shows that old magical way of understanding the world losing its power as the master’s documents blow away and the scrying mirror cracks. That business with ropes might well be a reference to Jodorowsky’s LA MONTAÑA SAGRADA which belongs to a confused time, when people tried to bring the magic back.
Wheatley’s regular actors are good enough to carry this off this sort of thing, but Shearsmith really isn’t. Especially as his character is the one transformed by the ordeal in the field. At its worst, FIELD reminds me of the art-house excesses of the 80’s. Greenaway at his most oblique, von Trier at his most self-indulgent. Hadn’t we grown out of the idea that style can stand in for substance? That obscurity implies profundity?
Compared to the claustrophobic intensity of DOWN TERRACE and the worryingly credible excesses of KILL LIST and the gleeful wrongness of SIGHTSEERS the lack of clarity in FIELD is both surprising and disappointing. Those other films do give an edge to the observation (while Whitehead is being tortured into compliance in the tent) that what the party lacks is the civilising influence of a woman. The women in DOWN TERRACE, in KILL LIST and in SIGHTSEERS are every bit as fierce and fearsome as the men in FIELD, if not more so. As men will do the men in FIELD are playing a game, hidden away from their responsibilities in the world.
Personally I found FIELD to be Wheatley’s clearest, most concise and complete film to date. In no small part because the fantastic writing, which is undeniably the best he’s worked with so far. But also because it is the most uncompromised film he has directed. I’m finding the insistent references to the Surrealist school of thought (Lynch, Jodorowsky) and art house movements more baffling than the story line (which I actually think is far clearer than most want to believe).
FIELD isn’t a product of an intellectual art movement , it’s a product of the last 10 years of underground, low production, DIY filmmaking. A quick scan through Vimeo will reveal an infinite collection of short films shot and edited in a similar style, and Wheatley himself constantly refers to the magic of current consumer level filmmaking equipment and the redundancy of the studio system.
What is evidently most confusing for viewers, is FIELD’s independence from mainstream cinema’s codes and conventions, however this does not necessarily make FIELD ‘arthouse’ as I doubt it will stand up to the same academic examination that Greenaway or von Trier would. Instead it is far more likely that FIELD represents a first success is a new strain of cinema only made possible by broadband internet speeds and high quality consumable film making equipment.
Well, while I agree that the studio system is vanishing into irrelevance, and that the technical barriers to putting a competent moving image on a screen are lower than ever before and still falling fast, and while I can well believe that FIELD is un-compromised in the sense that Wheatly has been able to put on the screen exactly what he wanted to (and get that released) I’m very skeptical about the idea that this is a Fresh! New! Original! Thing-the-like-of-which-never-was-seen-before! kind of film from a Fresh! New! etc. non-movement movement.
Of course there are parallels to Greenaway, to von Trier, to Jodorowsky, and doubtless others. They are there on the screen. They could only be more obvious if there were title cards introducing them. This is not a failure on Wheatly’s part, nor is it a weakness of the film. Most artists are mostly influenced by the recent past.
The story is quite straightforward, yes: one thing happens after another in a roughly straight line with the occasional magic trick. That narrative simplicity is a weakness of the film and is what will stop this film entering the canon of art-house cinema. But that’s not a failure either, supposing that entering that canon was not the goal. However, FIELD looks far too much like an art-house film to get away with that. It may have independence from mainstream cinema’s codes and conventions, but it is far from independent of certain other codes and conventions.
I’m actually more impressed by the simultaneous release over all channels, rather that the incremental release in descending order of profitability. That’s the bit that undermines the studios (we’ll work for now on the assumption that Film4 is sufficiently unlike a “studio”), that’s the bit the shows what grass-roots film-makers now have the power to do. The actual film, not so much.
I completely agree that there is nothing new, fresh or original about this, in fact personally I don’t think there is any academic basis for FIELD at all; it reeks of the type of cliche film and editing I used to make in college a decade ago (albeit much better). But I was ecstatic to see a film like this in my local picture house with a decent sized audience.
Still don’t get the references to Jodorowsky, Greenaway or von Trier though. If I had to compare it to something I would say It reminded me much more of Aguirre or Enter the Void, in terms of narrative and aesthetic. Really though, outside of Film4’s hyperbole, I don’t understand why everyone is so desperate to tie it to other films and established movements
To be clear, I don’t think there’s any “academic” basis to it either. And I’m not seeking to tie FIELD to anything. I simply think that a magician tied on the end of a rope is an obvious reference. Characters in big hats and big collars striking painterly poses is an obvious reference. And so on. That Wheatley put those references in doesn’t mean that he (or his Mrs) was being clever, and noticing them doesn’t mean that I’ve been clever.
Almost the opposite. The Wheatleys and I are almost the same age, so I’m guessing that they, as I did, spent a lot of time watching late-night movies on BBC2 in the mid 80’s and that this formed part of their view of what a “proper film” is like. Since they grew up in North London (whereas I grew up very nearly in a field) they might even have seen some of those same films at the cinema. No scholarly inspiration nor lineage to a movement is required.
Maybe I’m being churlish thinking that the little-known convention of commenting on the review (or at least pretending to do so) could be observed by those who have appended their thoughts, let alone that of avoiding spoilers. That apart, I wouldn’t give a chocolate frog for whether this is or is not whatever ‘an arthouse film’ may be, and whatever beliefs underlie pointing out that there is nothing new (as if there every really could be anyway).
As for Gavin’s review, I think that I might have differences of emphasis or of interpretation, but I do not disagree with him in general, and feel that he has characterized memorably some moments in a film that deserves a viewing. If, as I sense, it is getting a decent size of audience, then that is good, too, for what it has tried to do with simultaneous multiple release.
I know nothing about anything, but i really don’t get this film. It seems quite run-of-the-mill, not strange at all. This film ought to be released in the mainstream cinemas with a U certificate, so that young children can also be confused by it. Also, a cartoon version could do well shown early on saturday mornings. What i recommend is to buy/download/whatever a copy and then don’t watch it, instead take 5 dried grams of psilocybin mushrooms on your own in a dark silent room.
That’s telling Ben Wheatley & Co. !