A field in England

I was really excited for Ben Wheatley's latest film. I absolutely loved Kill List and proclaimed it as the best British horror film since Eden Lake (which I love) and when I saw the trailer for A Field in England I thought that it looked right up my street. The trailer was packed with weird imagery and great music and when I realised that it was going to be on the TV I almost fainted (OK a bit of an exaggeration there, but I was very excited). People keep saying that releasing a film on DVD, TV and on the cinema is the future, but I'm not convinced. It might work better for small low-budget films like this but with a highly anticipated Hollywood blockbuster? It would definitely lose money and Hollywood would not be happy. But anyway that's another debate. I decided to catch A Field in England on the TV via recorder and watched it with much anticipation... I was disappointed.

One of my biggest problems with the film is that it is very slow. A good 40 minutes of the film is dedicated to a group of deserters talking and walking. Don't get me wrong, I love a bit of character development, but 40 minutes of little action outside a man having a poo in a field is just too tiresome. However, there were a few funny moments. Things get a little more interesting when Wheatley's favourite, Michael Smiley comes in to the story. He's quite a menacing character who successfully shakes things up a bit. There's also a really great weirdly intriguing moment where a character exits a tent in slow motion with a rope attached to them which promises good things. However, soon after things get boring again with talking and digging.

I also found some of it quite difficult to follow, due to the Olde English dialogue, but I may be on my own there, as I'm a bit thick. Things start to get interesting when a character gorges on a load of magic mushrooms and we are treated to a wonderfully weird hallucinogenic trip, which must be the closest thing to being on hallucinogens since David Lynch's mesmerising Inland Empire. There are loads of flashing images, weird imagery and an unsettling droning score to go with it and it's undeniably unique. I've seen some weird films (weirdest being Conspirators of Pleasure) and this sequence is unlike anything I've seen before. After this things get incomprehensible and it's very difficult to follow.

Normally I would enjoy a Lynchian mind F but it started to feel monotonous and dull at times. Although, I did enjoy the beautifully shot shootout at the end. The film is very stylish, the black and white works very well, the directing is enchanting and the editing is impeccable at times. The film just needed a much thicker plot to go with it all and then there would be a winner. It's something I definitely need to see again to fully appreciate, but as it stands now my feelings towards it are very mixed. Love it or hate it, it's a haunting film that will stay with you for a few days at least which isn't such a bad thing. Is it?

'A Field in England' is exactly the film it tells you it's going to be: set entirely within said field, it tells the story of a group of soldiers from the English Civil War going mad from a combination of (the 17th century version of) shell-shock, their own religious beliefs, and an unhealthy dose of magic mushrooms. It's brilliantly acted, imaginatively shot and scripted, and yet, having watched it, I find it very hard to say what it's actually about. Stylistically, and atmospherically, it's coherent; yet its artistic success is, apparently intentionally, not supported by logic. I think it does what it sets out to do; but what exactly that is, it's harder to say.

A FIELD IN ENGLAND is an incredibly brilliant and haunting film. While it may look like a psychedelic horror movie, like WITCH FINDER GENERAL, in reality it is a very straightforward film based very directly on the English Civil War itself.

O'Neill, the Irish alchemist who tries to enslave Whitehead and his friends, is clearly based on the English monarch Charles I. Like Charles, O'Neill is an arrogant man who claims not only total earthly power, but the right to pass judgment on men and to interfere with the cosmos itself. Just as Charles I saw himself as chosen by God (not the people) to rule as an absolute monarch, so O'Neill sees himself as a god on earth.

Whitehead, the timid religious scholar who attempts to bring O'Neill to justice, represents the Puritan conscience of England. His evolution in the film from a meek, submissive cowardly man to a military hero parallels the way the Puritans themselves evolved from a hunted, despised minority to a powerful army of spiritual and political authority, able to recreate England in their own image.

What the movie does is not just to imitate history but to reflect on its deeper meaning. Notice how the earthy, ignorant common soldiers switch their allegiance in the course of the nightmarish conflict in the field. At first they feel great contempt for Whitehead, the Puritan. They ridicule his "soft hands" and laugh when he is degraded and tortured and forced to run on a leash like a dog. In the same way, the English of Shakespeare's time (like Shakespeare himself) tended to regard the Puritans as a joke. But over time, as O'Neill proves more and more arrogant and unstable, the soldiers (like the English common people) begin to respond to Whitehead's efforts to awaken their sense of justice and their own moral dignity. By the end of the film, even the lowliest and most ignorant of the soldiers is willing to sacrifice his own life in Whitehead's cause, and Whitehead himself has changed from a pitiful outsider to the leader of the tiny band of "rebels." The fall of O'Neil parallels the fall of Charles I, just as the rise of Whitehead mirrors the success of the Puritan revolution.

I've seen and enjoyed the last few films from Wheatley – not to the point that I love him but certainly to the point that I know he will bring me something interesting as a total package. He seems to do "brooding tone" very well while also engaging with plots, dark humor and generally well shot films. This one starts on the same way, moving characters into place and setting up some weird supernatural scenario which appears to be building and building. I was engaged by this but once we reach a certain point, it appears that this changes and it becomes almost nothing about a narrative flow and entirely about the visual and stylistic chaos of the final third.

Plot wise the film delivers nothing in this part. Characters who were dead show up, violent deaths occur, massive visions and tripping out. Those that defend the film say that you just need to go with this and that perhaps those that don't just don't like this sort of experience; I would point to 2001, it delivers content like this but does so in a way that makes sense and fits with the plot. In this case it is hard not to see it as being done for the sake of it and this is partly because the film is generally very aesthetically pleasing. The staged shots look great, the weird ideas are presented in a way that works (the two main "on a rope" scenes), the music produces a great sense of dread and generally it is a very well shot film. So when it offers nothing in the narrative sense, it is hard not to think that perhaps it has been focusing on the style all along and that any sense of a plot was merely just to get it where it needed to be so it could unleash stylistically.

Don't get me wrong, I liked it from this point of view but even having some structure or some basic narrative flow would have made it a good film, not just one that feels like the director was playing with how it looks and sounds. The cast deliver what is asked of them very well and their involvement is total, there are no bad performances here and I really liked the "small cast, small space" idea. Problem is that none of them have characters, just moments. They are great in this scene and in the next, but nothing bridges them. Indeed this is true of the whole film. Read the positive reviews here – they talk about how awesome a certain scene was or how great a certain visual trick was, but they really are not so clear about what was good about the film as a whole. Truth is I agree – there are lots of good individual moments, because the snippets are all cool to look at and very well delivered, but this isn't a music video, a fashion shoot or a 20 second commercial, it is a feature film that proposes to have a plot – but only proposes it.

For what it does well the film should be commended, but to ride on aesthetics alone for 90 minutes is a big ask and it is beyond this film. The ideas and structures probably cover it for fir the first half, but after this it really goes all out for the looks and style and, once you've had this and only this for 10 minutes then it starts getting boring without substance – and unfortunately once you hit that wall, there is probably still 20-30 minutes left to go, meaning it gets tiresome and a bit annoying. Worth a look for what it does well, but even on this level it has its limits – if this film is what he wanted to do then it would have worked much, much better as a 45 minute short.

Mr Wheatley's work seems to embody the concept of the Emperor's New Clothes. Each new offering seems to cause a ripple of delight amongst critics, yet the experience of actually watching his films is reliably disappointing. Admittedly, "Sightseers" had a certain darkly comic appeal, but "Kill List" was dreadful and this latest offering manages to be less interesting still. Historically implausible accents and dialogue aside, we are expected to swallow a series of random plot elements (presumably on the excuse that things need not make sense on mushrooms). Sorry, but that isn't good enough. Narrative may not be fashionable, but it does at least serve the purpose of keeping the audience interested. It is, however, very difficult to maintain any interest beyond about 40 minutes at which point it becomes clear the film is based on the law of diminishing returns. Back and white cinematography? Why is that, I wonder? Could it be to make things more realistic because they hadn't invented colour film in the 17th century? Please!