User reviews

A Field in England is most notable for being the first British film to be simultaneously released across every format on the same night. It has been released theatrically, pay-per-view, on DVD and on free television. It's a pretty audacious move and one that I hope works out for the film-makers as it could be a new way for left-field films to get the go-ahead to get made at all. It also reminded me of what it used to be like in the days before video recorders when I was a little kid. Whenever a movie came on TV it was a cultural event as a large percentage of the population sat down to watch it at the same time – we couldn't record it to watch it later or pause it to go and make a cup of tea we simply had to make time for it at the given moment and watch. I obviously wouldn't swap the flexibility we have nowadays but there was something to be said for sharing a movie at the same time as millions of others. And in a sense, the simultaneous cinema and TV release of A Field in England brings back this scenario and for that I am quite thankful.

The film itself? Well, it's a quite difficult one to accurately judge on a single viewing, as it was pretty confusing on the whole. Director Ben Wheatley said that he wanted to transport the viewer into the world of Civil War England with little exposition to explain what was going on. He wanted us to enter a world where the characters do things that would be second nature to them without actually explaining to us why they were doing them. It's a reasonable enough idea as events in the film appear somewhat surreal as a result. Having said that, I think it's obvious that the story is bizarre regardless of this. It involves an alchemist's assistant and some soldiers fleeing a battle and meeting an ominous cavalier in a field. The latter is looking for some unspecified treasure and he uses these men to find it. Throw in some magic mushrooms to complicate matters and you have one very weird movie.

I'm not 100% certain what to make of it on one viewing. It frustrated me a bit I have to admit, as it didn't necessarily make the most of the sinister possibilities inherent in its storyline. And by the end I really wasn't all that sure what had just happened. But it did intrigue me a little and I would be interested in returning to it at some later point. The cinematography was very good at times, while the soundtrack had an interesting mix of medieval drums, folk and ambient electronica. Acting was good enough with Reece Shearsmith of The League of Gentlemen always a welcome presence, while Michael Smiley was good as the cavalier. I'm not entirely convinced by A Field in England at the minute but I feel like unique films of this type should at least be encouraged in the UK so for that reason I am going to cut it some slack.

'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.

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.

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?

This film screams proto-Lighthouse; black and white historical psychological thriller featuring characters slowly losing their minds? Eggers MUST have taken notes!

Though I wouldn't say AFiE lives up to the monumental highs of Egger's 2017 masterpiece, it is still a unique watch that wasn't bad. Regardless, it is most certainly one of those 'out there' films, and will definitely polarize. Case in point, the hallucination scene near the end is a real spectacle - it manages to give half a glimpse into what our characters are tripping out to, but only that. Characters are also great and acted fantastically, especially Reece Shearsmith's Whitehead, who's got himself a bit of an arc. It can get a little self-indulgent, however, and the tiny cost of production does show, but overall I won't deny A Field in England is a substantial watch for such an under-budgeted film.

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 watched this after seeing a partial review of it on the BBC news channel.

I thought it was hard to comprehend the exact meaning of the film.

For what it is worth I thought the field represents some sort of parallel universe between the carnage of the battlefield and death. A transitional area where things are not what they seem. Men looking for treasure in the field but it did not mention what sort of treasure - gold or perhaps something more.

The acting was brilliant and you will be engrossed if you don't try to make too much sense of it. Good for late night but pretentious? Not sure I felt more frustrated with the Kill List than this one.

Many people may highly disagree with this sentiment, but I believe 'A Field in England' to be a masterpiece. It is a mind-blowing wartime odyssey that pushes the boundaries of narrative cinema, filled with shocks and surprises at nearly every turn. Experimenting with editing and filmmaking techniques to the point of psychedelic madness, Ben Wheatley crafts one of the most successfully surreal works of cinema I have thus far seen. Everything from the often hilarious writing to the hypnotic score is finely injected with intense talent and, in my opinion, enormous entertainment value. The amount of thrills and laughs in this movie totally subverts the idea that art house cinema is often "boring." This film is so alive and free and refuses to surrender to most cinematic norms, and yet it still follows a coherent narrative with memorable and enjoyable characters and genuine suspense; it nearly reaches the heights of a David Lynch masterpiece in terms of its ability to mix radical experimentation and surrealism with an engaging and cohesive story. Since Lynch is by far my favourite filmmaker, that is high praise. Anyone who is willing to be confused, appalled, and oddly amused owes it to his or herself to see this insane work of cinematic psychedelia.

This might not be every ones cup of tea. I had no expectations as I'd never heard of it till a few weeks ago.This low budget UK film has something about it that I can't quite put my finger on.I had to keep jumping back a scene just to try & figure out what was going on. With Julian Barratt from The Mighty Boosh making a guest appearance in the 1st scene I was drawn in, even though his part in the film was brief. For me this film was easy on the eye and worth watching if you are yearning to watch something different. IMDb class this as a horror but I didn't see anything to label it as a horror flick. More like an 17th .century drama. Though filmed in black and white only adds to the realism of this medieval based depiction of three 17th century men searching for something & I still don't know what. Great costume drama.that portrays an event that may or may not have happened in a field in England Not a fan of costume dramas I make an exception. 6/10

An undoubtedly interesting idea- civil war soldiers fleeing a battle encounter madness and witchcraft- directed by Britain's most "thrilling" young director should be a recipe for cinematic gold. The critics found it pretentious enough to unanimously praise, but I -and to judge from the commenters here- many others find it less than satisfactory.

For a start the writing, pacing and direction is far from "Thrilling". The dreary and undramatic opening scene sets the tone badly. We do not see what battle these men are supposedly fleeing and they may as well have been out for a country walk. There is no sense of danger or fear of being discovered and executed for desertion, they merely meet and decide to go to a pub.

What little energy there is in this opening is by having a character f-ing and blinding in a very modern way. This lack of authenticity hangs over the film, the exception being Reece Shearsmith who tries to impart a genuine 17th century earnestness into his part but does not have sufficient screen presence to carry the film.

From the start, the film moves slowly. There is a longwinded description by Shearsmith of his occupation then a rather pointless scene of one of the men emptying his bowels in a field. Nice!

The 'action' begins some 20 minutes in with an opaque and confusingly shot scene of them trying to hand plough a field. Have they never heard of horses?

Being in black and white doesn't help the clarity. I normally love b&w films but I could not see the reason for its use here, except to appear more profound than it actually is. The cinematography is flat and manages to make the English countryside look ordinary rather than beautiful or mysterious.

This movie is about ninety minutes of purgatory, I think.

Four men from the time period of Oliver Cromwell, I think, during a battle, I think, escape the perceived carnage by falling through a rural hedge. They form a four-man band and in a weary, bedraggled condition, trudge a field with ale on their mind. What follows then is plain and simple, puzzlement.

After spending an hour figuring out what I had just viewed I've plumped for, what you reap in life is what you sow in the afterlife.

I also watched the director's vague explanation of what the film is about and I am none the wiser. I think my assessment will at least give a future viewer something to mull over.

4/10

Wow, so much hate here for this film. One of the curses of filmmaking is that cinema is viewed as both entertainment, and art form. It appears from these boards that many were affronted when presented with something artistic when they were expecting to be entertained. What exactly were people expecting from a film with this plot synopsis? Fair enough, the viewer may not like Wheatley's vision, but the vitriol heaped on this ambitious film seems savage to me. It saddens me greatly that a singular vision such as this one is cut down with comments like "how dare he waste my time with this pretentious crap". Shouldn't we be applauding ambition (even if it is not successful) instead of the endless parade of artistically bankrupt sequels and rehashes that Hollywood churns out?

Wheatley is one of the most interesting filmmakers working in the UK today. He has a unique directorial voice (how many of those do we have?), he is prolific and can knock out a film a year even in this economic climate. His films sometimes puzzle me, but they linger in the mind. I'm eagerly awaiting his next.

A pop song is such as where anybody and everybody can get the gist of the beat, the hook and the catch within seconds. Accessibility is key. Metaphorically, this is not a pop song. Rather this is something original and strategically and thoughtfully created despite minimal resources used. Made from a shoe string budget of £300,000 this is a film that in itself is a mushroom trip.

If anyone's taken psychedelic mushrooms before, you know that one possible consequence of the evening is that things would occur in repetitive circular cycles. Repeating the same sequence of events over and over unknowingly.

This movie feels like a mushroom trip. Shot in black and white, it spirals in and out of control, much like a trip.

I watched this solely because Ben Wheatley directed this and I thought Kill List was a pretty damn good, an amazing attempt at something original and cool. Go watch that movie. then take special "mushrooms" and watch this.

Yes, A FIELD IN ENGLAND truly is that bad. It's a massive disappointment and pity, because Ben Wheatley's previous films as director (DOWN TERRACE and KILL LIST) have showed real promise, hinting at greatness to come. But this is a step back. It's not that the direction is particularly poor, it's just that Wheatley's script with Amy Jump is so drivelling and has absolutely nothing to say.

That's what this film offers - nothing. Characters are barely realised and interchangeable, humour is forced and unfunny, and the scenario doesn't ring true. I like English Civil War-era history, but this isn't that; it could be set in any period, it's just an excuse for dressing up. I get the impression that Wheatley watched VALHALLA RISING and thought 'Ah! I want to make a film like that!' with this as the ungodly result.

The problem is that VALHALLA RISING was a great little movie, with a strong narrative to sustain the artier scenes, and it also had something to say. A FIELD IN ENGLAND has nothing to say - we've learnt absolutely nothing about anything by the time it finishes. I think the most off-putting part of it was, to me, the various interludes where the characters pause, their hair blowing in the wind, mid action. It's like some game of 'What's the time, Mr Wolf?' gone horrifically wrong.

I looked for meaning here; I looked for insight. I wanted it, I wanted to be proved wrong after my initial gut feeling. But the truth is it isn't there. A FIELD IN ENGLAND is just an obscure mess that wastes the talents of everybody involved. If you want to include arty, abstract stuff in a film, then build it into a straightforward narrative that will give viewers something to hook onto. Forget that, and forget your film being watchable in any respect.

In this saga, where it's set in the 17th century in rural England where a nervous man goes along with three others during the chaos of a civil war to try and locate the man who vexed or did some wrong to his master and once he comes upon this sorcerer of sorts (O'Neil is his name, played by a great British character actor, Michael Smiley, you've seen him before somewhere) who makes this man and the others dig in the dirt to find treasure that may likely not be there, it's all about its unique sense of the world through visuals. This is black and white, grimy and gritty, where men have to squat and take s***ts and may end up being stung by nettles (or already have various ailments since it's g-ddamn 17th century backwoods England), and the director is one for bringing out the artifice in this stylized world, how it is all a moving painting after all.

For the first hour I was digging what is a fairly unique experience, with a filmmaker really in love with the kinds of films that Herzog and perhaps Tarkovsky too made in their prime (Aguirre and Andrei Rublev come to mind at first, especially Herzog with the moments where the characters pause to be frozen - but we know they're being frozen as they intentionally pose - for tableaux that are funny and disturbing, but paintings all the same). It's also wildly violent at times, and the shock of it is visceral but it's also done in such a way that we shouldn't be too repelled by it since it already goes hand in hand with everything else around these people.

There are hallucinatory touches here and there - a moment of intense screaming from Whitehead, as he follows O'Neil into a tent and proceeds to scream for a reason we can't see or know exactly why (call it the wiles of a sorcerer I guess) leads to Whitehead walking out of the tent being led by a rope tied around him, and it's done in the sort of intense slow-motion long take that might make von Trier sit up and take notice. It's a massive moment in a movie that is meant to wow us with visual splendor over plot, which is fine... until the last half hour when it becomes *only* that. Wheatley is working from a script (written by someone else) so there is the semblance of a story, and the small cast makes it that we know who everyone is despite some (though certainly not all) of the dialog being that British that needs subtitles.

But, know this before going in, this movie is weird. I mean like, weird-weird, the sort of weird that tests my thresh hold as someone who loves weird s***. I think the thing for me is the context: is it from the mushrooms that Whitehead scarfs down while squatting in the field more than halfway into this movie? What's with the, uh, fuzzy planet that he keeps seeing in the sky coming his way? And then Wheatley and his editors go completely daffy with cutting together and superimposing images like there's no tomorrow - there's actually a warning at the start of the film that there are intense strobe effects (guess Wheatley may not get too many epileptics coming up to him with Field in Englanfd posters) - and it all is impressive on the surface.... but at the end of it all, what's the point? I couldn't help but feel by the end of this that I wasted my time, even as I was impressed by the actors who really commit to this world, and it's a truly unique world that we feel immersed in, because there wasn't a good emotional through-line.

That may sound like I'm not opening myself up to the experimentation or poetry but, believe me, I was. I left this somewhat cold, admiring it being a vision from someone really going for something daring, but not giving a squib for the people on screen - and by the last ten minutes especially it's squarely an exercise in style and ultra-violence (how a couple of characters die is especially graphic, I mean gratuitously so). A Field in England is like when your much hipper friend on facebook posts some obscure underground rock album that is supposedly one of the coolest/most hardcore things you've never heard before. And there may be a reason it's obscure.

Even if it only costs me the time I sometimes wonder why I still bother? I'll try and be charitable and put that this 90 minute film will entertain students the undisciplined and the pretentious, and I might have enjoyed it as well at 15. But as you get older it should get easier to gauge this kind of arty nonsense as something to avoid to save your own precious time. Over the decades I've sat through all kinds of good stuff and all kinds of trippy tripe from Bunuel to Vigo and Pasolini to Goddard but still get caught out in seeking genuine Art. I first learnt to be more careful after UK ITV hyped up their premier broadcast of Peter Hall's Akenfield on 26th January 1975 – what a good looking colossal waste of space that was! As profoundly empty as this is.

Some of God's Englishmen, five earthy soldiers in the English Civil War have some kind of mind experience in a couple of fields full of mushrooms in avoiding the heat of battle. The sharp black & white photography and imagery is excellent and sometimes marvellously bizarre, but the story is obviously secondary and appears to be an afterthought. At least the sets were cheap…what sets? At turns it's boring, violent, rambling, seedy and pointless, which if you add intensely incoherent makes it a perfect bad trip. And it definitely wouldn't have helped me to see as well as hear the process of the noisy defecation or for the camera to have gone right up the bloke's poxy penis, however 'tis a pity the black planet didn't swallow them all up. Probably Bunuel would still have enjoyed it though!

Most of us don't understand the minds of psychopaths; I wouldn't knowingly cross the road to get to know one better, and so with films. I seek no answers because I expect no answers, only some amount of entertainment. I read so many times from "open-minded" highbrows expressing their lofty criticisms of feeble-minded middle/lowbrows, whilst in various ways they explain they're not sure of and/or hope there is a meaning behind the art film they're commenting on - what can I say in the face of such misplaced optimism?! Only: Time Will Tell. I personally think the true meaning can be found with the in-your-face noisy defecation, the director probably only regretting he couldn't physically rub the audience's nose in the excrement being forced out.

No wonder UK Film 4 is non-subscription nowadays if this is an example of how clever they are in chasing an audience. If you're pushing 40 you probably should avoid this drivel (life's short), but if you're young and with moderate sense but without hang ups you could watch it just to give yourself a very base point for all the excellent and even arty films you will see in the future.

i saw this film on a really big screen at berlin's fantasy film festival last night - and it blew me away.

outstanding photography. excellent editing. brilliant sound design. great acting. beautiful landscapes. darkest witchcraft. and a wonderful sense of humour.

many here seem to think this film is just pretentious. others praise it for being extremely innovative. to me, it seemed neither. it certainly is unconventional in many ways, especially in terms of story-telling. but at the same time it seemed to have a distinctly 20th-century, more specifically 1960s/70s kind of vibe to it. a great reminder of what magic the cinema is capable of when it relies on its inherent, traditional strenghts and techniques rather than trying to enhance them with all kinds of digital trickery.

i must confess i had never heard of ben wheatley before. but this film to me seems to place him in the tradition of great film artits like kubrick or greenaway.

so if you get a chance to see this on a big screen, and are patient and open-minded enough to enjoy a poetic, trippy, funny black-and-white movie: don't miss it!

I just watched and it was a lot better than I expected - the acting was generally good from actors perhaps best known for comedy roles who were perfect when the few comedic moments happened

Not everyone will get it - it may take two or three viewings to fully enjoy it although it did leave a few questions unanswered

I think filming in black and white(are we still allowed to call it that? :D) helps a lot with the atmosphere and the bleakness of the time period

TBH I wouldn't class it as horror - more a "period mystery" if there is such a sub-genre

Well done to all concerned - will be checking out the director's other work 7/10