The closing credits of Ben Wheatley's In the Earth (2021) flicked across the screen like slides from a nonexistent catalogue of Ghost Box and I wished Mark Fisher had been alive to review this film. Its exhausted future has branched into our present; its invocation of the parapsychological '70's is as skeptical and self-undermining as it is psychedelically energized; it is as much a meditation on the forms of folk horror as the thing itself. It was my first film of the pandemic era and it's set the bar high.
Two years ago, the film's setting of a global pandemic would have made it science fiction; now it merely looks like an AU, since the unspecified contagion for which Martin Lowery (Joel Fry) is disinfectant-sprayed and screened by samples of blood and urine isn't COVID-19, though it has produced a similar climate of isolation and anxiety. Conversation alludes to third waves, months of lockdown, the devastation of nearby Bristol. The woodlands first seen by the slow zoom through the eye of a menhir—an image that will recur as ambiguously and implacably as a black sun or a fossilized scream—have been requisitioned as a research site by the government for the duration of the "crisis," the former holiday rental of the lodge at its green-yawning edge transformed into a quarantine station that retains its decor of antlered chandeliers and ye olde woodcuts among the plastic sheeting and folding chairs. To rendezvous with a colleague in mycorrhizal studies, Martin will have to hike two days into a forest of special scientific interest where the soil is unusually fertile and mobile coverage is nil, a journey we might entrust without a second thought to the professional woodcraft of Alma (Ellora Torchia), the park ranger who's been delegated as his guide, but side-eye rather more when assigned to a gangling perma-grad student whose diffidence borders on the pathological. Nonetheless, the worst thing that happens on their first day out is that Martin is absolute rubbish at pitching a tent. Alma smokes by their fire at night; the film never misses a chance to light her beautifully sculpted skin like bronze. The discovery of an empty tent with a child's picture book tangled in a skein of blankets and cookware is sad, but not mysterious: "I saw a camp like this once. A family. They came out into the woods, got sick, and . . ." And then on the second night they are set upon as they sleep, thrashed, robbed, left to traverse the hazards of the prickly, thin-beaten track barefoot as penitents, and their well-timed rescue by the gentlemanly, if slightly grandstanding squatter who introduces himself as Zach (Reece Shearsmith) soon proves no more reliable than the refuge they find with Dr. Olivia Wendle (Hayley Squires) in her fairy ring of strobe lights and synthesizers, probing the earth for something more elusive and numinous than crop productivity. "This isn't chance," she insists of their arrival as flares hiss like dragon-stars in the night beyond her perimeter and a fog-wall of spores encircles the field where the menhir stands sun-pierced, the forest looking through itself. "It isn't. And you can't fight it." It is a measure of the film's maturity that the question isn't whether she's right, but if so, so what?
( It was everything. )
It is not frustrating to me that the film does not resolve its own questions. It doesn't feel like insincere withholding or a substitute for the writer-director-editor caring enough to know. It reminds me of the strange stories of Robert Aickman, where explanations would never actually help; it insists on the unknowability of the truly alien, the acknowledgement of the uncontrollable, cosmic horror in a handful of moss. Actually, outside of the gore, I am not sure that I found In the Earth upsetting except in the ways that it upsets me when people falsify the world. That said, persons with sensitivities to strobe lights and either foot or eye trauma should perhaps not watch this movie and persons who are not me may still want to watch it with the option of earplugs. The cinematography by Nick Gillespie, the score by Clint Mansell, and the sound design by Martin Pavey are all superbly immersive, simultaneously grounded and grainy and otherworldly and opulent, and passages of them are not intended to be any easier on the audience than on the characters. I still wish I had been able to see it in a theater, as I did its predecessor and companion in low-budget, high-concept old weirdness, A Field in England (2013). I am reliably informed that not all of Ben Wheatley's films contain hallucinogenic freakouts, I just happen to have caught the two that do. I hope most of them share the humor, which is here predominantly but not strictly black comedy, like the way that the progression of Martin's pained reaction shots pricelessly suggests the outcome of a walking tour by Kafka. I appreciate also, perhaps not incidentally to its moment, that a film so much about who is in tune with the land firmly foregrounds a non-white protagonist: it inherits obviously from The Stone Tape (1972) and The Legend of Hell House (1973), but the flickering flame of Penda's Fen (1974) is in there, too. It was shot in fifteen days in the summer of 2020 and closes with the poignant end title, "The producer would like to thank the cast and crew who stayed in the bubble and kept each other safe." And here we still are, or some of us are, and here are others not listening. This guidance brought to you by my chance backers at Patreon.
Two years ago, the film's setting of a global pandemic would have made it science fiction; now it merely looks like an AU, since the unspecified contagion for which Martin Lowery (Joel Fry) is disinfectant-sprayed and screened by samples of blood and urine isn't COVID-19, though it has produced a similar climate of isolation and anxiety. Conversation alludes to third waves, months of lockdown, the devastation of nearby Bristol. The woodlands first seen by the slow zoom through the eye of a menhir—an image that will recur as ambiguously and implacably as a black sun or a fossilized scream—have been requisitioned as a research site by the government for the duration of the "crisis," the former holiday rental of the lodge at its green-yawning edge transformed into a quarantine station that retains its decor of antlered chandeliers and ye olde woodcuts among the plastic sheeting and folding chairs. To rendezvous with a colleague in mycorrhizal studies, Martin will have to hike two days into a forest of special scientific interest where the soil is unusually fertile and mobile coverage is nil, a journey we might entrust without a second thought to the professional woodcraft of Alma (Ellora Torchia), the park ranger who's been delegated as his guide, but side-eye rather more when assigned to a gangling perma-grad student whose diffidence borders on the pathological. Nonetheless, the worst thing that happens on their first day out is that Martin is absolute rubbish at pitching a tent. Alma smokes by their fire at night; the film never misses a chance to light her beautifully sculpted skin like bronze. The discovery of an empty tent with a child's picture book tangled in a skein of blankets and cookware is sad, but not mysterious: "I saw a camp like this once. A family. They came out into the woods, got sick, and . . ." And then on the second night they are set upon as they sleep, thrashed, robbed, left to traverse the hazards of the prickly, thin-beaten track barefoot as penitents, and their well-timed rescue by the gentlemanly, if slightly grandstanding squatter who introduces himself as Zach (Reece Shearsmith) soon proves no more reliable than the refuge they find with Dr. Olivia Wendle (Hayley Squires) in her fairy ring of strobe lights and synthesizers, probing the earth for something more elusive and numinous than crop productivity. "This isn't chance," she insists of their arrival as flares hiss like dragon-stars in the night beyond her perimeter and a fog-wall of spores encircles the field where the menhir stands sun-pierced, the forest looking through itself. "It isn't. And you can't fight it." It is a measure of the film's maturity that the question isn't whether she's right, but if so, so what?
( It was everything. )
It is not frustrating to me that the film does not resolve its own questions. It doesn't feel like insincere withholding or a substitute for the writer-director-editor caring enough to know. It reminds me of the strange stories of Robert Aickman, where explanations would never actually help; it insists on the unknowability of the truly alien, the acknowledgement of the uncontrollable, cosmic horror in a handful of moss. Actually, outside of the gore, I am not sure that I found In the Earth upsetting except in the ways that it upsets me when people falsify the world. That said, persons with sensitivities to strobe lights and either foot or eye trauma should perhaps not watch this movie and persons who are not me may still want to watch it with the option of earplugs. The cinematography by Nick Gillespie, the score by Clint Mansell, and the sound design by Martin Pavey are all superbly immersive, simultaneously grounded and grainy and otherworldly and opulent, and passages of them are not intended to be any easier on the audience than on the characters. I still wish I had been able to see it in a theater, as I did its predecessor and companion in low-budget, high-concept old weirdness, A Field in England (2013). I am reliably informed that not all of Ben Wheatley's films contain hallucinogenic freakouts, I just happen to have caught the two that do. I hope most of them share the humor, which is here predominantly but not strictly black comedy, like the way that the progression of Martin's pained reaction shots pricelessly suggests the outcome of a walking tour by Kafka. I appreciate also, perhaps not incidentally to its moment, that a film so much about who is in tune with the land firmly foregrounds a non-white protagonist: it inherits obviously from The Stone Tape (1972) and The Legend of Hell House (1973), but the flickering flame of Penda's Fen (1974) is in there, too. It was shot in fifteen days in the summer of 2020 and closes with the poignant end title, "The producer would like to thank the cast and crew who stayed in the bubble and kept each other safe." And here we still are, or some of us are, and here are others not listening. This guidance brought to you by my chance backers at Patreon.
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