A black-and-white psychological horror drama, set during Britain\u2019s 17th-century Civil Wars and involving buried treasure and trippy hallucinations?<\/p>\n
Hi-ho, director Ben Wheatley and his co-writer wife, Amy Jump, are back in town.<\/p>\n
\u201cA Field in England\u201d is the latest and most fiercely strange film from Wheatley, who is himself the most fiercely strange filmmaker currently working in Britain. \u201cKill List\u201d (2011) was a scuzzy little hit-man movie that turned surreal with paranoia; last year\u2019s \u201cSightseers\u201d was a cheerfully bleak comedy about a serial-killing tourist couple. \u201cA Field in England,\u201d like the others scripted with Jump, pushes into areas both avant-garde and bizarrely funny. The movie\u2019s definitely something, although I\u2019d be hard pressed to say what. Maybe Samuel Beckett\u2019s idea of a period film.<\/p>\n
Shot in crisp wide-screen monochrome by Laurie Rose \u2014 oddly, I was put in mind of the classic Oscar-winning short \u201cAn Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge\u201d \u2014 \u201cA Field in England\u201d opens on the fringes of an anonymous raging battle, from which the dandyish Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) is fleeing in terror. Joining up with two grizzled mercenaries, Cutler (Ryan Pope) and Jacob (Peter Ferdinando), and a gentle conscripted peasant known simply as Friend (Richard Glover), he high-tails it over the hedgerows. \u201cWe\u2019re not running away, we\u2019re going for beer,\u201d insists Cutler.<\/p>\n
In fact, Cutler is bringing them to O\u2019Neil (Michael Smiley), a lordly malefactor encamped in a field he believes has buried treasure in it. Using the prissy, appalled Whitehead \u2014 who has skills in divination \u2014 as a human truffle hound and the soldiers as muscle, he intends to dig until the treasure, whatever it is, is found.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the setup, which is just as quickly set aside for a series of shifting power games among the men. O\u2019Neil is the alpha male and whatever he does to Whitehead inside that tent to get him to comply, the latter\u2019s screams are much more horrible than if we\u2019d seen it. \u201cIt does not surprise me that the devil is an Irishman,\u201d says Jacob, \u201cbut I thought he\u2019d be a little taller.\u201d<\/p>\n
Did I mention the magic mushrooms? Finding them growing nearby, Cutler uses them to break down his captives\u2019 defenses, and the filmmaker uses them to break down ours. \u201cA Field in England\u201d has an agreeable 1970s B-movie attitude toward recreational pharmaceuticals and gonzo psychedelic sequences, and toward the end \u2014 just as tensions are coming to a head \u2014 Wheatley uncorks a lulu, the film threatening to buckle under the assault of audiovisual wackness. Here might be the place to call attention to Martin Pavey, who has done the sound design for all Wheatley\u2019s films and who creates frightening aural moonscapes that tilt the movie further off its axis.<\/p>\n
At certain points in \u201cA Field in England,\u201d the action stops dead as the characters pose in tableaux. Why? Who knows, but like many of this director\u2019s visions, it gets under your skin. In the movies of Ben Wheatley, there\u2019s a larger, more cosmic nightmare just beyond the sight of both characters and audience, and maybe he\u2019s treating us kindly by only giving us glimpses. Says Friend \u2014 who like all peasants appears to be both cannon-fodder and unkillable \u2014 \u201cI think I have worked out what God is punishing us for. Everything.\u201d
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