The
‘shrooms will do little to clarify the fog of war—not that they are supposed
to. Instead, they will make matters considerably worse for a ragged band of English
Civil War deserters trying to forge their separate peace in Ben Wheatley’s
ultra-low budget historical mindbender, A
Field in England (trailer
here), which
opens this Friday in New York.
Whitehead
is coward, who is incapable of functioning as any kind of self-respecting
soldier. He is such a sniveler he can barely summon the courage to desert.
Essentially, he lets three of his former enemies pull him through the archetypal
hedgerow serving as the battlefield’s boundary, in search of a pub. However,
Whitehead has a secret mission to fulfill on behalf of his alchemist master. He
is to capture O’Neill, an Irish sorcerer.
Unfortunately,
Whitehead’s quarry has the jump on the mismatched comrades. Much to their chagrin,
they will be forced to do O’Neill’s bidding as he searches for an ominous treasure
buried somewhere in the deceptively peaceful meadow. Clearly, this will not
turn out as well as the WWI Christmas Eve truce.
In
one sense, the black-and-white uber-moody hyper-stylization of Field is quite a departure from the
working class grit of Wheatley’s Kill List and Sightseers. Yet, there
is a kinship in the way all three films place unassuming proles smack dab in
the center of a burgeoning maelstrom of horror. Much as he did with Kill List in particular, Wheatley builds
a sense of steadily mounting dread, while instilling the feeling something
sinister looms just outside the audience’s range of vision.
To
that end, Wheatley regular Michael Smiley fulfills all O’Neill’s villainous
duties with malevolent aplomb. Considering Wheatley’s surreal approach often
borders on the experimental, Smiley’s O’Neill adds that much needed element of
fun. In contrast, the deserters are a motley lot of Falstaffian variations that
only start to differentiate themselves during the third act.
