Catching Up With 2013: "A Field in England" (Ben Wheatley)

(fan poster by Richard Wells)

The field arrives quickly, and the characters shortly after.  The first man is a foppish alchemist (Reece Shearsmith) with delusions of divining powers.  He escapes an off-screen war and wanders into the field.  It's a field laced with two treasures.  One of the two - a mysterious buried treasure - may not even exist.  The other treasure - patches of psychedelic mushrooms - is very real.  Throughout the film, people boil the mushrooms in soup and chomp down mouthfuls.  There might be other sources of food in the field, but the characters never bother searching.

The character names evaporate from memory, and maybe that's for the best.  They function chiefly as types and images.  Although the diviner is the ostensible hero, the biggest impressions come from the intimidating thief (Michael Smiley) and the soft-faced buffoon (Richard Glover).  The latter gets an opportunity to sing a traditional English ballad directly to the screen.  It's a lovely song, although like most scenes in the film, it arrives and disappears arbitrarily.

(image courtesy of Bloody Disgusting)

A Field in England tries to explain this disconnection (and others) with the mushrooms.  At any given point, the characters' perspectives (and therefore the film's) may be under the influence of hardcore hallucinogens.  That would explain the big, black, ever-expanding star in the sky.  The way the heroes pose in "tableaux vivants," waiting for an unforeseen photographer to snap a picture.  How a character dies and then shows up later, in great shape given that whole death thing.  Or one scene where the heroes suddenly, with no preamble, pull on a previously unseen rope tied to a previously unseen pole for no given reason.

The shroom-induced scattershot psychedelia sometimes creates impressive moments.  One creepy sequence culminates with the diviner exiting a tent in extreme slow-motion, his face contorted in a disturbing rictus.  Lush black and white panoramas evoke memories of Bergman's The Seventh Seal.  And the climax deserves some recognition for how successfully it communicates the idea of total sensory overload - the rapid editing and strobing don't just overwhelm, they earn the film a seizure warning.

(image courtesy of Bloody Disgusting)

Unfortunately, all these nifty surreal moments suffocate the story, because when any shot can follow any shot, and any dead character can suddenly be alive, then nothing matters.  Essentially, at the end of any given sequence in the film, the filmmakers can hit a switch, completely change what's happening, and leave it to the viewers to blame it on the mushrooms.  There's beauty here, but that beauty often feels vacuous and slightly self-impressed, with little meaning to the visuals beyond the achievement of their oddness.

Filmmakers Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump are responsible for Kill List, a film I liked very much.  That film also had a baroque streak to its story of wayward men who plunged into uninhibited madness, but Kill List grounded its outrageous images in a plausible middle-class drama.  That grounding is exactly why later deviations in the story felt so deviant.  A Field in England has plenty of stunning sights, and that will make it worthwhile for some viewers, but isn't surreality more effective when there's a meaningful reality for it to disrupt?

RATING: C