Hands up if you went into 2020 thinking we’d spend a year dodging in and out of lockdowns as a viral pandemic swept across the world like something out of a movie? In the Earth is, for all intents and purposes, a pandemic horror film and one of the first of its kind. The latest from writer/director Ben Wheatley (Kill List, A Field in England) feels like an attempt at capturing the unease and alienation which came from lockdown whilst marrying those taught sensations with the Folk Horror Wheatley has become famous for. It is a trip.
Whilst a deadly virus sweeps the world a scientist (Joel Fry) and a park ranger (Ellora Torchia) venture deep into woods near Bristol for a routine equipment run. After being attacked in the night, they awaken shoeless and disorientated in the dense forest but soon accept help from a mysterious hermit named Zach (Reece Shearsmith).
No stranger to paranoia, unease, or alienation from our environment, Wheatley has already taken cast member Shearsmith down a similar rabbit hole in 2013’s psychedelic folk trip A Field in England. It’s a film which split opinion but its ability to capture the dread of a period-set mind succumbing to psychotropics is a pretty niche and undeniably gorgeous experience. It’s an experience Wheatley clearly wanted to subject a contemporary audience to after such a significant time away from day-to-day life…and the cinema.
Conceived and shot during the pandemic, In the Earth feels like Wheatley going back to his roots. Considering the director’s recent ventures, it’s a totally stripped back affair. After relatively low-key Indy offerings Wheatley has deservedly moved up the ladder, pulling off a big budget adaptation of High Rise, a star-studded Tarantino-esque action Free Fire, and an opulent yet lukewarm Daphne Du Maurier adaptation in Rebecca all in the last 6 years. For the folks who saw a kind of folk horror reinvention in Wheatley’s introduction it’s a welcome return to form.
All these characters are specialists of some form, yet none of them are prepared for the horror ahead. All of them are dangerously preoccupied with a loved one they miss. Characters, like people in lockdown, look for safety in the known. Something tangible with a consistent thread of logic. Whilst the unnamed virus sweeps the world outside, this small group ends up stuck in a nightmare within a nightmare. Self-imposed isolation in an ancient forest was never going to end well.
Hailey Squires’ Kurtz-like researcher is holed up with an array of machines and strobe lights, desperately trying to communicate with the consciousness of the forest using light and sound. Reece Shearsmith delivers perhaps his best performance to date distilling years’ worth of eerie British archetypes into the mysterious nature-worshipping hermit Zach. Between the two, pandemic pandemonium feels fully represented.
Its Wheatley’s most visually accomplished films to date by far, taking those trippy techniques from previous ventures and turning them up to a hundred. Usual composer for Wheatley’s films, the ever-excellent, Clint Mansell brings a sense of the otherworldly with oscillating synths, ghostly choir, and experimental sounding grunge noise. There’s a touch of ambient Eno and a flavour of pulpy 70’s Carpenter to it. You can never quite be sure what is score and what is coming from the on-screen madness, which only helps drag the viewer into this sordid trip. It is, after all, a film about communication (above all else) and it feels like Wheatley is desperately trying to make us feel something.
Wheatley picks up the folk realism he broke onto the scene with, back in 2014’s Kill List, and merges it with the arthouse psychedelica of A Field in England. The result is an intoxicating contemporary folk/eco horror experience set against the backdrop of global pandemic. In the Earth doesn’t have the bite or bluster of Wheatley’s fiercest moments, but it isn’t really supposed to. This is socially awkward horror for the Covid age. It finds tension in the unpredictable ways people can manifest desperation for contact. It relishes the chaos in our desperate attempts to control our environment or find reason in the unreasonable. It’s a kind of isolation tone poem which leaves the viewer feeling like they had a religious experience, or survived a brush with dangerous ancient sorceries. Like the pandemic, the film is a stark reminder that even for all our ingenuity, we are cosmically out of our depth.
Dir. Ben Wheatley
Stars. Joel Fry, Reece Shearsmith, Hayley Squires, Ellora Torchia,
