Tag: Ben Wheatley

In the Earth

Posted on by victorfraga

The Covid movie is sadly becoming a fad, with Songbird (Adam Mason, 2020), Host (Rob Savage, 2020), Locked Down How It Ends (Daryl Wein and Zoe Lister-Jones, 2021) and Locked Down (Doug Liman, 2021) coming out in the USA in the last six months. The only two that are worth bothering with are Host (a horror movie all set on Zoom) and Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth, which just had its virtual world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. The reason that In the Earth and Host work is because they are out-and-out horror films. Who really wants to see a Covid romcom? Songbird is a manufactured-by-committee take with a clearly exploitative nature (it’s produced by… Michael Bay) and becomes a snore-fest very quickly, after some amusing world-building in the first 30 minutes.

The seed of the idea for In the Earth emerged during the first lockdown back in March 2020, and by August Wheatley had shot the film over 10 days. The setting of the pandemic takes us some time into the future, but exactly when is not clearly specified: there is some virus that has been released in the world, is it that new British strand of Covid? Maybe.

When Martin Lowry (Joel Fry) arrives Gantalow Lodge, he must undergo disinfection procedures before he embarks on a journey into the heart of darkness, accompanied by the Park Ranger Alma (Ellora Torchia). The proceedings have an ominous tone from the get-go. Colleague Dr. Olivia Wendle is somewhere in the woods area, and you see where this is going. It’s essentially Wheatley revisiting his trademark mishmash of lysergic-drenched folk-horror, but with a plot that riffs on Annihilation (Alex Garland, 2018) and Stalker (Andrei Tarkosvky, 1979).

Wheatley very quickly outmanoeuvres the audience at every step along the way. The “somewhere around Barstow when the drugs begin to talk hold…” moment hits at about the 40-minute mark. The film is relentless from that moment onwards, all the way into the end credits, which are just as visually arresting as the film itself. The narrative is all over the place, but that’s in line with Wheatley’s smaller psychedelic films: this is very much Kill List (2011) meets A Field In England (2013). Due to the low cost, Wheatley can indulge in all the kaleidoscopic morphing effects that tickle his fancy, along with some extremely intense strobe lighting. If you are epileptic and your seizures are triggered by flashing lights, this is probably one to skip.

In the Earth may be Wheatley retreading some of his trademarks, but after making some bigger and better films (2015’s High Rise in particular) he seems to able draw from the same well while still fine-tuning the style of horror that he made his name on. The film is also helped enormously by the pounding and disorienting score by Clint Mansell, who Wheatley has used on everything besides Free Fire (2017). Wheatley was very smart to seek him out when he had “graduated” to the point that could afford him, and it’s blossoming into Mansell’s most fruitful collaboration with a director since Darren Aronofsky. It’s a testament to Wheatley, who may often be working on slim budgets but at the same time is the most imaginative British filmmaker in decades, something we need more of in British cinema. Wheatley made the great Covid movie, never mind the great Covid horror movie… sadly there will be more from hacks, but at least one was great.

In the Earth has just premiered at Sundance.

The Ghoul

Posted on by mjbstaging

A police inspector investigating a bizarre shooting incident in a London house goes undercover as a mental patient to investigate his prime suspect: a psychiatrist. The nature of mental illness being what it is, after the policeman has gone undercover it becomes increasingly hard to distinguish whether he’s really a policeman undercover as a mental patient, as was initially suggested, or whether he is in fact an actual mental patient with delusions of being an undercover policeman.

The Ghoul was executive produced by Ben Wheatley who gave British actor-turned-director Gareth Tunley a small role in dirty gem Kill List (2011). The Ghoul weaves a complex web of relationships between policemen and colleagues, policemen and suspects, psychiatrists and patients. Real and assumed identities. And this web takes the form of a Möbius strip. As psychiatrist Morland (Geoffrey McGivern) explains it to his patient Chris (Tom Meeten), it’s a strip of paper twisted then joined so that if an insect were to land upon it and walk its length, it would come to be on the other side from where it was previously without in any way crossing over from one side to the other. Proceed for the same distance in the same direction again, and it would be back where it started. As pictured here:

In his role as a policeman, Chris has driven down by night from Manchester to London in order to help to investigate an attempted double shooting. Lengthy discussions with colleagues Jim (Dan Renton Skinner) and Jim’s partner Kathleen (Alice Lowe) point to Coulson (Rufus Jones), Chris assumes the role of a man with mental health issues and takes up counselling sessions with psychiatrist Fisher (Niamh Cusack) so as to gain access to Coulson’s file at her office. She passes him on to another psychiatrist, the aforementioned Morland, who is currently counselling Coulson.

Morland talks to Chris at great length about various obsessions including a bottle “of which the outside is the inside” and explains the Möbius strip. Meanwhile, Chris has been following Coulson around the streets. Eventually Chris finds himself driving from Manchester to London again, traversing the Möbius strip, back where the film started.

Like that other Möbius strip movie Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997) this opens and closes with a point of view shot of a road from a car driving along it at night (those familiar with Lynch’s work will probably notice a resemblance between the road markings at the beginning of the 1997 film and the art work above). It has much in common too with B-movie thriller Shock Corridor (Sam Fuller, 1963) in which a Pulitzer-prize-hungry newspaper man goes undercover as an asylum inmate in order to solve a murder that has taken place there. While Shock Corridor plays out as a linear narrative, albeit one in which deluded characters occasionally shift into lucidity, The Ghoul constantly shifts in terms of the identities of its characters.

A number of questions are raised. Is Chris a cop or a loner with mental problems? Is Kathleen his superior on the force or the girl he’s fancied since his Manchester student days? Is Coulson the subject of an investigation or Chris’ best mate? These games the piece plays with its audience and the way it folds back upon itself are ultimately what make it worth seeing.

The Ghoul is out in cinemas across the UK on August 4th. It was made available on BFI Player the following month.

Free Fire

Posted on by victorfraga

The first thing you should know if you are planning to watch Free Fire this weekend: “from executive producer Martin Scorsese”. Scorsese produces his own films, but apart from them, he doesn’t sign many other productions. Usually they are related to music, such as the HBO TV series ‘Vinyl’ (Allen Coulter, Carl Franklin et alli, 2016), about the Rolling Stones, or they deal with the cinema industry, such as the doc Life Itself (Steve James, 2014), about the Chicago-based film critic Roger Ebert. In fact, Free Fire is a jolly hybrid of opera and thriller. It is a very strange composition. No wonder Marty was curious about the British director Ben Wheatley, a fan of gangster movies based in Brighton.

Free Fire is an opera buffa. It is a love letter to the ’70s. Wheatley told DMovies on the occasion of its premiere at the 60th BFI London Film Festival: “Free Fire is a kind of an action movie and it is pretty funny too. I am going back to the cinema I really like” – click here for our exclusive interview with the filmmaker. As an exaggerated comedic feature, it plays with the sense of likelihood. All characters are stuck inside an old factory in Massachusetts. Usually, in a mafia film, there are three kinds of ending: the criminals go to jail, they are set free, or they die. There is always the runaway sequence in which your adrenaline levels rise. What makes Free Fire different from other gangster movies is that the characters never leave a confined space, a warehouse. And they never die.

More than a reincarnation of a Robocop in the skin of a gangster, Cillian Murphy, Michael Smiley, Armie Hammer and Sharlto Copley are silly men resisting death. They are as shambolic and clumsy as Coyote, the Looney Tunes creation that pursues the Road Runner (“Bib bib!!!”). And they all crawl for a woman, Justine (Brie Larson). She has brokered a meeting between two Irishmen and a gang led by two other men in a deserted warehouse. But then shots are fired during the gun handover and everything turns into a big mess.

The film tempo is quite slow. It works as an adagio in an opera. Because characters are hurt and never die, it prolongs the drama that each gangster experiences. Vernon’s (Copley) drama is that his new suit is now full of dust and has a hole.

As any opera, Free Fire also relies on a spectacular stage setting. Production designer Paki Smith, best known for his work on Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, 2005), got his inspiration to build a warehouse from The Friends of Eddie Coyleas (Peter Yates, 1973) and The Killing (Stanley Kubrick, 1956). The set comes to life as a space composed by three floors of dirt, debris and detritus. It is the perfect stage for gangsters who forget which side they are on. In dust, there is truth.

It is true that Free Fire isn’t a movie with a complex philosophy behind it. It doesn’t profess to be edifying and didactic film about the IRA and how assassinations at that time were treated as “crimes only” and not “terrorist attacks”. Nonetheless, the story is a heart-stopping game of survival. The real show is wild. There is nothing more to add to the adjective. The film reveals that anarchy is in the blood of Britons. Anarchy never dies.

Free Fire was out in March, when this piece was originally written. It is being made available on DVD, Blu-ray and EST in August.