The writer-director talks to Film4 about A Field In England. Subscribe to Film4 for more interview specials, clips and trailers: bit.ly/2up0y8g #BenWheatley #AFieldInEngland #Film4
Reece Shearsmith ( Whitehead) was bone chilling as he staggers out of the tent after the brain freezing screams. It's a scene that will remain with me for a long time. Shearsmith is such an incredible actor. He is able to portray abject horror & terror with no dialogue. Pure genius.....
The film's greatest achievement, in my opinion, is its tremendous ease in creating feelings of claustrophobic fear in a wide open space. All we have on paper is a group of actors stomping through a field for most of the film, yet Wheatley and his crew are such gifted craftsmen of image and sound that one is seduced into the alien without ever noticing the spatial tricks and strings. The whole show just feels real, historical and visceral. This movie is alchemy in its purest cinematic concoction.
Never heard of this guy before tonight, but I just watched _Kill List_ followed right away by _A Field in England._ Genius, I'll be watching more of his films.
I Love this film. It's difficult to put into words why it resonates with me, but it does ! Praps it's the raw earthiness of the times when this country still had lots of wide open countryside and forests before "progress" covered it all in concrete !
I see this film as a statement on the futility and horrors of war (having served 2 combat tours of Iraq and Afghanistan), the lies soldiers are fed (the mushrooms) the self delusion of war and the belief you're doing the right thing (the treasure), friendship, loss, religion, insanity, grief, desperation, isolation, claustrophobia, fear, terror, guilt. All common themes.
This film & Dead Man's Shoe's have to be the best UK directed films in the last 20-25 years - A Field In England is stunning made all the better for being shot in B&W
Its a great film. Its got the feel of the time down well and a great story, lots of humor and some powerful scenes. All the references to magic and are great - its the only time I've heard somebody use the term "Homunculus" in conversation so points for that! You can see links to the "Kill List" occult workings, wish he did more stuff like these two movies.
FreakBoi2008 Ah, will check it out. The Homonculi have always fascinated me, a French King allegedly had a few kept in his court, each with very different characteristics. Like this films setting though, it was an age when science, magic and quackery all existed side by side. I thought that Sean Connery film where he plays a seductive priest who is persecuted is a good example of the hysteria of the time. Also, I suspect the scene in this movie where the protagonist is bound by O'Neils "magic rope" is a riff on the scene in "The Seventh Seal" when the falagellants appear - all the kneeling and the sudden shock of the scene - now THERE'S a great film (and what a powerful scene! It shits on "A Field in Englands" effort, though it is certainly a future classic - great stuff).
I disagree... It's not a great film. It's fine and muddled and pithy. It is in no way a "Great Film". The bit where Reece emerges from the tent on a rope was great... But the rest was middling.
A Field in England // Master of Alchemy - Electric Wizard I like it! People nowadays get jumpy and unsettled if the movie story is not "on the plate" ... Use your mind from once in a while.
Great movie. It's always a terrible thing to say "people just don't get it", but it might rely on conventions of a genre that is maybe too obscure to allow the movie to work without a bit of opening exposition. Almost all reviews and comments call it a movie about drug trips and hallucinations, but if you look at it as genuine lovecraftian cosmic horror, it really is not a terribly complicated and quite straightforward story. It may rely too much on notions that most people simply don't know.
I remember seeing a watered down version of this interview on C4 many moons ago, and three things still ring true years later... 1) Ben Wheatley is by large the most exciting British filmmaker working in the industry today. And will be for many years to come. 2) He is also a fantastic editor, which goes unmentioned with much of his work. His timing and sensibility are impeccable. 3) Reece Shearsmith is an absolute treasure and talent. One of the greatest working British actors, he has a lot in the tank and I'd love to see him cast in further lead roles.
Nice insights. I wonder if there a specific list of readings about the times when magic was turning into science, and about the role of mushrooms and folklore. Anyone knows about that? Thanks.
Been going through Ben Wheatley's filmography and must say this is one of the most weird film I've seen at first. But after hearing his explanation and researching on Google what it is really about then did i finally understood what it is all about😅
i believe the symbolism is this: friend is the soul, which is why he is resurrected, jacob is the body, he is always hungry and in pain, whitehead is human morality, cutler and o'neil represent greed.
The film felt to me like an antidote to the way BNP types imagine England of the past as a place that would welcome them... Our closest ancestors would be completely alien to us as we would be to them. Instead of nostalgia we can have some compassion for things we cannot understand and recognise the recurring subjects of folklore as a way of navigating our relationship to historical AND geographical relatives. I really appreciate that Ben and Amy deal with "England" as a subject, as does Reece in so much of his other work. I wish the pushback against fascism looked like this more often.
It took me six months to root out one Irishman, til I stopped the mummery, became the field, and now I am my own man. I am my own master. I had no recollection of consuming anything of the sort, yet I have been holding inside myself many things I did not understand. First I had to watch this film, now its time to open up and let the devil in. OPEN UP AND LET THE DEVIL IN!
This was a fair film, but it promised much more than it delivered. It seemed half-baked. It would have benefited greatly from a good script doctor/ dramaturge, a much tighter plot and character development, and stronger sense of place in the "field" to which the title refers as well as the particular historical England in which that field sits. After the terrific trailer, it looked to be a brilliant sideways thriller like a cross between "Rosenkrantz and Gildenstern are Dead", Jim Jarmusch's "Dead Man", and "Picnic at Hanging Rock". Sadly, it didn't deliver in any of those directions. No learned metaphysics, no Blakean otherworldly psychomache, no haunting mystery. Just drugs and weirdness. What a missed opportunity.
That was somewhat my take as well. It was frustrating because I could tell there was a huge, unsettling power to it, but a lot of it got lost in what I saw as clumsy or silly artistic decisions. I still really like it, but I think with more cutting and polishing it could really be a masterpiece instead of a curiosity.
