Ben Wheatley - vo.rs

A Field in England: Wheatley's Monochrome Bad Trip

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013) is the film he made when nobody could stop him, and you can feel that freedom in every frame. Shot in twelve days, in black and white, for very little money, released the same day across cinemas, television, DVD and video-on-demand in a distribution stunt that Film4 dressed up as an experiment, it is the most purely formal thing Wheatley has done. There is a hedge, a field, a rope, some mushrooms, and five men in seventeenth-century clothes who walk into the frame sane and stagger out of it wrecked. That is nearly the whole plot. The film is a machine for turning an English meadow into hell.

Kill List: Ben Wheatley's Bait-and-Switch into the Dark

Thu, 16 Oct 2014 09:00:00 +0000

Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (2011) is the film that made me trust him, and it did it by lying to me for forty minutes. You sit down to what appears to be a hard British drama about a marriage falling apart at a dinner table, and by the closing frames you are somewhere that should not be reachable from that starting point, a torchlit hillside where robed figures are chanting. The astonishing thing is that the route is real. Watch it a second time and every turn is signposted; the film only feels like a betrayal because you were not paying the right kind of attention. That is the trick, and it is a genuine one.