A Field in England (2013)
Directed by Ben Wheatley
During the Civil War in 17th-Century England, a small group of deserters flee from a raging battle through an overgrown field. They are captured by an alchemist, who forces the group to aid him in his search to find a hidden treasure that he believes is buried in the field. Crossing a vast mushroom circle, which provides their first meal, the group quickly descend into a chaos of arguments, fighting and paranoia, and, as it becomes clear that the treasure might be something other than gold, they slowly become victim to the terrifying energies trapped inside the field.
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What critics compared A Field in England to
The stunningly bleak, utterly arresting and eerily rendered black and white photography recalls the monochromatic unease of David Lynch’s Eraserhead, a film which relies mainly on its bizarre, often profoundly horrifying symbolism to power you through the experience.
Similarly to their last feature, the underwhelming A Field in England (2013), the film’s tone is uneven and a handful of memorable images fail to cohere or contribute to a greater effect.
Filmmaking partners director/editor Ben Wheatley ("Kill List," "A Field in England") and writer/editor Amy Jump tackle J.G. Ballard's 1975 novel, but while the film is visually and aurally entrancing, the tale of a society reveling in its breakdown loses its focus, its central character's observational stance holding us back from emotional involvement.
High-Rise, a darkly funny adaptation by cult English director Ben Wheatley ( Kill List , A Field In England ) of the J.G. Ballard novel of the same title, preserves the book’s ’70s setting, steeping its vision of a toppling society in retro decadence: brutalist apartments carpeted in ankle-high, cream-colored shag; flight attendants in red uniforms dancing in a pill-induced dream; women in tunic dresses slumping into sectional sofas or against walls of ribbed concrete, drinks in hand.
Best known for being the iconoclastic visionary behind the psychedelic Crusade-set freak-out A Field In England and the blacker-than-black comedy gangster flick Hit List, outside of more recognizable star power Wheatley thankfully doesn’t waver an inch closer to the status quo in his latest work.
This merging means that High-Rise is a delightful culmination of Ben Wheatley’s previous work, as it combines the concise disciplined storytelling of Sightseers and Kill-List with the caustic, disjointed approach of A Field In England.
Wheatley, the indie director probably best known for 2014’s A Field in England, shoots the class-warfare chaos with a hallucinatory beauty.
Bajo el manto del folk horror , con igual importancia, se incluyen cintas más ancladas a la brujería como The Witches (1966), Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), The VVitch (2015) o Hagazussa (2017), y las películas más apegadas a la idea de ritos ancestrales como The Ritual (2017), las dos joyas de Ben Wheatley, Kill List (2011) y A Field in England (2013), o la reciente Apostle (2018) de Gareth Evans.
The movie’s part of a wave of smart indie horror films that include “It Follows,” “The Babadook,” Jeremy Saulnier’s upcoming “Green Room,” and anything by Ben Wheatley (“Kill List,” “A Field in England”).
This casual category takes in such delightful British entertainments as Blood on Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man, Witchfinder General and the recent A Field in England.
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It’s a ghost story drenched in gritty, saltwater-flecked period accuracy and anchored in cautionary maritime fables, but one with a boozy, amorous, and darkly comic edge that made me think of everything from The Birds to Ben Wheatley’s similarly trippy A Field in England .
The closest things we have in the current cinematic landscape are Ben Wheatley films like Kill List and A Field in England —if The Last Witch Hunter was an artifact of the 1970s, it would be a bona fide cult classic among certain segments of horror fanatics.
One of the most welcome developments in contemporary genre cinema has been the creeping revival of the folk horror, with Ben Wheatley’s Kill List and A Field in England, David Keating’s Wake Wood, and Tom Shankland’s The Children tapping into the old ley lines.
Jim Williams’ (“Raw,” “A Field in England”) score ranges from slow jazz to pulse pounding electronic.