A Field in England

Ben Wheatley has made a film that can’t decide what it wants to be. That’s both its weakness and its strange charm.

Set during the English Civil War, we follow Reece Shearsmith as Whitehead, a cowardly alchemist’s assistant who flees battle only to fall into worse company. What begins as a simple tale of deserters seeking an ale house becomes something far more sinister when they encounter Michael Smiley’s rival alchemist O’Neil in a field of mushrooms that might as well be a portal to hell.

The immediate experience proves jarring. We’re thrust into the film with little explanation, forced to pick up the story via the period dialogue. Compounding matters, instead of the kaleidoscopic colors typical of psychedelic horror, Wheatley shoots in stark black and white, leveraging inverted camera angles, extreme close-ups, and infinite pools of abyssal blacks to convey his mind-bending torments.

And while the digital photography lacks film’s organic texture, Wheatley embraces this limitation, freezing his characters in tableau-like poses, as if trapped in old photographs. It’s an inspired touch that, like the monochrome photography, amplifies the film’s otherworldly atmosphere and strange sensibilities.

The performances crackle. Shearsmith makes cowardice compelling without turning pathetic. Smiley brings genuine dread to what could have been camp. Both exude a sense of fatalism. They’re trapped in Wheatley’s twisted tableau, and we’re trapped with them.

But here’s the rub: the film hedges its bets. Horror scenes get undercut by comedy. Comedy gets strangled by horror. It’s as if the film feared being too pretentious about its period setting and dialogue, leaving us with something that suggests greatness but settles for very good.

Still, there’s dark magic in this field. Wheatley understands that the most unsettling stories happen in broad daylight, in open spaces where there’s nowhere to hide. A Field in England may not achieve greatness, but, depending on your mood, its middle ground between genres might be exactly what you’re looking for.