By Nick Stark
BEN WHEATLEY is one of Britain’s busiest filmmakers – and also one of the strangest.
The man behind the critically-acclaimed Down Terrace, and the rather more disappointing Kill List and Sightseers, has a new movie now playing in Los Angeles that manages to combine a 17th Century action drama, a surreal magic mushroom trip and a merciless social study-cum-class commentary.
A Field in England follows four wandering ex-soldiers in the aftermath of a bloody Civil War battle. The lads start off in search of that great British pain-reducer, the nearest pub. Instead they fall under the authority of O’Neil, a self-important Irish necromancer (Michael Smiley), who forces them to work in a field where he believes buried treasure is to be found.
Instead, they find pain reduction of a different stripe, sampling a local soup laced with hallucinogenic mushrooms, which adds a disturbing new dimension to their encounters with each other and the appallingly brutal Smiley. The audience too, will likely find the jagged editing and strobe lighting as the lads’ acid trip kicks in positively nauseating.
In common with both Sightseers and Kill List, A Field in England often feels random and disconnected, but nonetheless holds the attention for a while, probably only because of its otherness, despite an opening 40 minutes which one leading British reviewer described as “a rambling am-dram-ish nightmare of cod Cromwellian dialect and teasing surrealism in which a sequence of straining defecation comes as relief from the tedium”. True to Wheatley’s form book, the movie is punctuated with explosions of hyper-violence, leaving the viewer feeling not enlightened, hardly entertained, and desperately in need of a shower.
“A Field in England.” No MPAA rating. Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes. At Cinefamily, Los Angeles, and Downtown Independent, Los Angeles. Also on VOD
