In Ben Wheatley’s England, the countryside is a place where the occult lies, thinly-veiled, behind the façade of a bucolic paradise. In his latest film, written by frequent collaborator and spouse, Amy Jump, Wheatley allows his fascination with British folklore, a fascination that can be identified in each of his three other feature films, to take precedence in this tale of an unlikely band of tripping treasure hunters. Beginning in a council house in Brighton, it is possible to trace the evolution of a certain breed of unscrupulous figures as they set about ascribing their own warped sense of morality onto the world through the filmography of this incredibly productive filmmaker. Wheatley’s characters, in essence, can be found throughout British history manifesting at various times as hit-men in Sheffield, caravan enthusiasts in the Lake District, or, most recently, as renaissance men in A Field in England (2013).
Down Terrace (2009)
is Wheatley’s first feature in which he introduced audiences to the convoluted
logic that his characters often implement to defend their actions. In this
film, the director’s presence is felt in his typically untypical approach to
the genre he is about to take on. As such, Down
Terrace is a crime film in which not an awful lot of crime takes place; that
is, not outside of this circle of supposed gangsters. Opening with the image of
a father and son, played by real-life father and son Robert and Robin Hill,
leaving court after being acquitted for a crime we are never made fully aware
of, the film develops into a character study of this blackly comic troupe of
criminals and the paranoia that engulfs them. When this paranoia reaches
boiling point the family unit, completed by a magnificent Julia Deakin as the
omniscient matriarch, begin to wage war on those close to them before
eventually turning on each other. Indeed, the scale of their self-delusion can
be determined by the way these characters, after murdering the charismatic
Michael Smiley, deem the death to have been selfishly brought on by Smiley’s
character himself. As the murder toll increases, with Wheatley’s camera leaving
the confined space of the terrace house very rarely, the drama becomes focused
on the dynamics of this unusual, but in ways wholly recognisable family. One
thing that is notable from this first offering is Wheatley’s use of music, with
the drama pausing frequently as Bill (Robin Hill) plays archaic British folk songs
that chime closely with the songs we hear from A Field in England’s 17th-century soldiers.
For his second outing, Kill
List (2011), Wheatley continues to keep his camera facing toward the
British criminal underground that he presents us with in his debut. Where Down Terrace had its grounding in black
comedy, however, Kill List introduces
us to Wheatley’s distinguishable brand of horror. Whilst comparisons have been
made with British horror classics such as The
Wicker Man (1973), such analogies only prove partly true. Instead, the film
plays out as a triptych of different genres; moving from the close-knit drama
of domestic arguments and dinner parties, to the hit-man film draped in
realism, before finally dealing in explicit horror made all the more effective
by the film’s initial refusal to place its audience in an escapist world where
the supernatural is allowed to exist. The result is one of the most intense
cinematic experiences you could ask for, with Wheatley’s use of editing and expert
handling of the genre allowing him to create a film that, despite including a
modern-day cult that harks back to the British folklore, seems entirely
plausible and free from artifice. Whereas Hollywood would no-doubt turn such a
script into a film that is sold to the viewer as a piece of fantasy, Wheatley
creates a film in which the horror seems suited to both the real world and the paganistic days which were
thought to be long forgotten. It is a technique which has not been implemented
so well since 1999’s Blair Witch Project.
Here, however, it is Britain’s dark history and even darker secrets that, in Wheatley’s
world, are never too far away from broaching on the present. The result is a
very particular and terrifying brand of homemade horror.
Working from a script devised by the film’s stars Alice Lowe
and Steve Oram, with additional material provided by Amy Jump, Sightseers (2012) sees Wheatley combine
his love for comedy, one which can be traced through his television career
working on shows such as Ideal and The Wrong Door, and his fascination with
charismatic murderers. The set-up is entirely British; a pair of lovers set out
on a caravanning holiday around the north of England, absorbing the culture of
pencil and tramway museums that would drive anybody to mass murder. When the
violence does arrive, it is Wheatley’s unflinching directorial style that
provides the shock as he refuses to cut his camera away from horrific images in
a bid to tap into the YouTube sensibility that he has admitted as being an
influence on his filmmaking. The result is a combination of twisted comedy and
stark horror that complement each other perfectly and signal once again the
ease at which Wheatley is able to shift between different genres. As in Kill List, the vistas of the English
countryside prove once more a troubling place in Wheatley’s world. The reason,
offered by the auteur in a recent Q&A at Latitude festival, lies in
recurring nightmares that he suffered from, born out of an uneasiness induced
by the woods near his childhood Essex home. In his latest film, A Field in England, Wheatley traces this
uneasiness back to the 17th-century, a time when an entire class of
forgotten people roamed the British countryside searching for, according to
this film, an interesting combination of friendship and hallucinogens.
A Field in England is
a monochrome Civil War film in which you will find no scenes of battle,
connecting it quite interestingly with the criminality of Down Terrace. Evoking the godless symbolism of Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal, the film is guaranteed to
etch many a memorable scene in the mind of the viewer; that is, of course, if one
is able to keep hold of it. Warnings before the film begins regarding
stroboscopic sequences do little to prepare you for the mind-blowing effects
created by Wheatley and Jump’s remarkable editing, especially during the
hallucination scenes caused by the consumption of some rather suspect mushrooms.
If the countryside has been a place of danger up until this point in Wheatley’s
career, it has now transcended that as the field in which this film takes place, reminiscent of Kaneto Shindo's terrifying Onibaba (1964),
becomes very much a character of its own, warping the minds of this already
quite twisted group of deserters led by Michael Smiley (Down Terrace, Kill List) and The
League of Gentleman’s Reece Shearsmith. One scene that particularly confirms
this film’s long-lasting impression on the viewer involves the scholarly
Whitehead (Shearsmith) exiting Smiley’s tent, his face painted with one of the
most demonically disturbing expressions that horror cinema has to offer. As
well as innovative editing, Wheatley also makes use of the avant-garde
technique of tableau vivant,
capturing his actors in still motion as a means of cementing even further the
absurdity of this truly bizarre trip into Britain’s past. Following on from the
comparatively commercial Sightseers,
the distributors of A Field in England,
under Film 4’s newly revealed creative banner Film 4.0, opted to release the
film in cinemas, on video-on-demand, on DVD, and on the Film 4 channel all at
once; a suitably interesting distribution process for such a bold film as this.
What’s more, the film’s executive producer, Anna Higgs, has confirmed that this
release strategy has led to an increased amount of awareness that has actually
seen more cinemas requesting the film, despite viewers having the option to
watch it at home. Quite rightly so, too, as the film’s tagline promises a ‘trip
into the past’ which, on the big screen, couldn’t be more vivid if you were in
the field with a belly full of mushrooms yourself; which, on the grounds of
this film, you want to steer well clear of.
