A Field in England has a glorious opening fifteen minutes. I couldn’t explain exactly what happens after the introduction, but director Ben Wheatley definitely has a certain mad wizard control over his narrative.
A Field in England plays out as if Wheatley has a bag of marbles (the setup) and then he dumps out the entire contents of the bag and just watches where all the colorful spheres scatter. Some of his marbles stick in clusters (to the setup) and some roll so far away they almost get lost. But they sure are pretty when they roll. And he definitely follows all of them to their stopping point. The further they scatter, the more misdirection there is.
So what is the setup? Four men (Reece Shearsmith, Richard Glover, Peter Ferdinando, Ryan Pope) wander away from a battlefield in 17th Century England.
They desert mostly because, to varying degrees, they’re over it and don’t really know what “it” us, other than it just sucks to march, fight and sleep in fields. Also, one of the gents speaks of an alehouse he saw, so clearly he’s one to follow.
As they embark on a journey worthy of hobbits, they all have separate plans. One of them thinks that he could write a book. One of them thinks he knows where treasure is. One of them has magic mushrooms.
They never make it to the alehouse. They stop in a field. What follows is a series of power struggles. Who follows who when there is no general? Who kills who when there’s no ideology at stake? They encounter another man in the field, who might be the devil (Michael Smiley, who does not smile). He, in some unseen way, tortures Shearsmith in a tent. But the devil does have ale, so despite his overtaking of the group, he’s put up with.
A Field in England is another Wheatley concoction where the narrative shifts into a different genre after the setup. In Kill List it was torture into folk song, in Sightseers it was road comedy into horror. Here Wheatley has made a trippy triptych. One piece of this kaleidoscope pushes Brit wit humor (the setup story is almost The World’s End, except there’s more of a threat from dysentery than robots); one is psychedelic (there’s a strobing, ten-minute hallucination that is a very much a chapter of the film); there’s also some horror (heads and ankles explode).
This is probably the least accessible of Wheatley’s films before he makes his bigger cinematic jump (that’d be High Rise, an upcoming J.G. Ballard adaptation starring Tom Hiddleston). But it is very assured both in camera and tone and in its Shakespearean dialogue. It’s original. It’s daring. But also it feels very much like a 12-day shooting experiment. Which it was.
There’s potential for a sort of Ravenous level, nasty black comedy (shot in black and white). Instead, A Field in England has some sections that feel like that Ghost World art school video, “Mirror, Father, Mirror” that we chuckle at.
There’s a humming electricity in Field, but there’s a feeling that Wheatley is making fun of both independent and avant-garde filmmaking to the point where he actually starts to enjoy it and then fully commits to one side: the avant-garde. Once Wheatley goes full tilt, there is no narrative whatsoever and everything, for me, became a little maddening.
But then again, I saw it sober. And the sound design and the wind movements did very much feel like a mushroom trip.
I loved the set-up, I might not have loved everywhere that Wheatley went, but I am impressed that he so strongly follows his divergent tendencies – all while keeping a steady tone. That’s the maddest thing about this mad, mad movie. It has no reason to be consistent. But somehow it is.
Brian Formo is a featured contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel. You can follow him on Twitter at @BrianEmilFormo.
