“There are only shadows here.”
Fear is a matter of perspective.
After all, there’s no logical reason why anyone should fear a darkened closet, right? It’s just a wooden board over a small space, a small space set aside for clothing, toys, deformed siblings your parents want kept out of sight, you know, the usual stuff. And yet…with the right haze of exhaustion, with the proper application of foreboding darkness and deceitful lighting…suddenly what you are facing is not a small area for forgotten oddments. Suddenly you find yourself pinned in an enclosed space with a gateway that might open up to anywhere…or anything.
Similarly, it is hard to imagine a more innocuous, pleasant place to spend a day than a field in the British countryside. I’m pretty sure there’s an entire cottage industry devoted just to milking the inherent romance of such a vista. Rolling green hills, a gently stirring wind, limitless skies with small armies of clouds gently traversing to places unknown…what could be more peaceful?
Enter Ben Wheatley.
Ben Wheatley’s first four films have proven him to be not an interesting new voice in genre film, but a burgeoning master of the cinematic form, a director with such an immediate and distinct control over the frame that there is almost no way to describe his films beyond “A Ben Wheatley movie.” His films slip from genre to genre, never allowing the audience a chance to fully anticipate exactly where the narratives are heading.
But the movies never come across as frenetic or sloppy. He is not simply throwing ideas and homages at the screen to see what sticks. No, what Wheatley has done with each of his films is construct elegant, beautifully observed character-based stories, stories which then allow him the latitude to shift from giant laughs to bloodcurdling screams and back again.
Just look at his first movie, Down Terrace. A tiny little film, Down Terrace is set almost entirely within the confines of a single house in some anonymous corner of squalid London. The film centers on a mother (Julia “MARSHA FROM SPACED!” Deakin), father and grown son (played by real-life father and son Robert and Robin Hill) who do…something…in relation to organized crime, though their actual duties are entirely beside the point. Dad and son have recently been released from jail, and they suspect that someone close to the family ratted them out and may do so again.
That sounds like the set-up for an agreeable bit of black-hearted gangster fun, sort of like an even lower rent Guy Ritchie joint. There’s a failed hit centering around Michael Smiley’s affable hit-man that is just a masterpiece of escalating passive-aggressive humor, and the film could have easily succeeded as just a minimalist gangland lark. Wheatley’s after something different, though, something richer and darker. What Down Terrace gradually reveals itself to be is a parable about the moment when a young man needs to step out from under his parents and become his own person. Wheatley may be playing with gangster movie tropes, but the core of the film is watching a family rip apart the world around them out of an obscene, selfish attempt at self-preservation until there’s no one left to turn on but each other. Down Terrace follows this path all the way to the bitter end, wringing jetblack laughs from the bloody affair right up to the final punchline.
Even with the clearly cheap production values, Wheatley still managed to display impressive chops behind the camera, milking certain sequences for unbelievable tension. He has an almost preternatural sense of when best to drop the diagetic sound completely and watch a doomed character flounder in abject silence, twisting the knife in the audience’s collective gut right before the screen-characters do the same to each other.
But it was Kill List that really set the Internet ablaze with Wheatley fever. In the same way that Gareth Evans took everything great about Merantau and then doubled down on it to forge the instant classics The Raid and The Raid 2, so too did Wheatley take everything that worked brilliantly with Down Terrace and then amplified it for what eventually evolves into a wicked little horror yarn.
In telling the story of a two business partners (Neil Maskell, Smiley again) who find themselves trapped in a deal that has gone catastrophically awry, Wheatley displayed a knack for the slow-burn horror tale that some filmmakers have been chasing their entire careers without such success. Every scene, no matter how innocuous on the surface, throbs with unspoken menace. There is a sense throughout the entire film that some unknown line has been breached and that with every step our baffled protagonists are stumbling deeper and deeper into an inhuman doom.
And here, again, we see Wheatley’s emphasis on character payoff. Kill List could have easily become an exercise in a young filmmaker mashing up bits of his favorite movies, but instead it focuses on telling the specific story of these two men allowing their worst impulses to override their better judgment and delivering themselves into a truly horrific fate. The humanity of Wheatley’s films is always dingy, ugly, and more than a little mean, but it’s clear that Wheatley has genuine affection for his characters. Or, at the very least, an honest fascination with the bizarre lives they lead.
Nowhere is that more clear than Sightseers. Sightseers wears the skin of a romantic comedy, having jumped one and relieved it of its face, Silence of the Lambs-style. At first blush, it’s telling a familiar story about repressed shut-in Tina (co-writer Alice Lowe) who throws herself into an adventure with her new boyfriend, Chris (co-writer Steve Oram) before they really know each other. The performances and humor of this set-up are so strong, Sightseers probably would have been totally successful as a little observational comedy. Whether it’s the hand-knitted lingerie (complete with vaginal slit) or the funniest dog-death since A Fish Called Wanda, Sightseers has a lovely, deadpan comedic voice that would be more than enough to sustain a whole movie.
Except this is Ben fucking Wheatley we’re talking about, and so pretty soon the lovingly shot fields are flowing with blood. Turns out that Chris is something of a monster, one who feels not the slightest bit of remorse at acting out his anger by bashing in some unlucky soul’s skull with a branch. And, more disturbingly, when Tina finds out, it really doesn’t bother her.
In a lot of ways, Sightseers is a continuation of themes explored by horror films like The Haunting or Rosemary’s Baby, films about repressed women who find themselves in the crosshairs of some horrible intelligence. But where those women are consumed and compromised by the darkness, respectively, Tina takes ownership of it and frees herself.
That thematic trend becomes even more explicit with A Field in England. To be fair, it is just about the only thing that is explicit in A Field in England. Whereas all of Wheatley’s previous movies had been idiosyncratic, A Field in England is just plain fucking weird, so much so that even trying to explain the plot feels like wasted energy.
Shot in only twelve days, the film follows a cowardly apprentice (Reece Shearsmith) to an unnamed alchemist as he flees from a battle in the English Civil War. He runs into a small group of fellow-deserters and together they set off towards the promise of an alehouse. Except instead they come into a field where they meet a guy (Smiley again [sensing a trend]) who comes from… somewhere… and this guy makes them do… stuff…
I’m not being coy or anything in keeping the plot description so minimalistic. Wheatley seems unconcerned with any sort of narrative satisfaction in the film preferring to gesture towards preexisting relationships and a cosmic disorder, but anyone expecting clear cut explanations or payoffs is shit out of luck.
Instead, Wheatley focuses his considerable skills on conjuring an oppressive mood, suffusing the frame with menace even in scenes consisting of nothing more than men chatting in a field. Something has been broken in this world, some madness set loose, and the film moves steadily along with the horrid immediacy of a waking nightmare. Reality folds in on itself, time breaks.
Not bad for a film shot in twelve days. And, again, the movie is another opportunity for Wheatley to explore the way in which individuals come into their own in a fraught situation. Regardless of whether you understand the actual text of the film on first blush (and you will not) the character arc is crystal clear as Reece’s bumbling putz suffers his way towards actual maturity and responsibility.
Over his first four films, Wheatley has refined his approach and his team, getting better and better at each at-bat. Even if one film does more from you than others (Kill List remains foremost in most people’s minds) there is little arguing that his films have been growing more technically complex and accomplished as he has gone along. Wheatley’s team includes cinematographer Laurie Rose, composer Jim Williams, and co-writer/editor Amy Jump. Together, this team has plumbed the darkest depths of humanity on the scantest of budgets, never failing to make the journey as riveting and entertaining as humanly possible.
Wheatley’s kept busy. He directed the first two episodes of the current Doctor Who season (the second of which, ‘Into the Dalek’ is one of the best episodes the rebooted series has ever produced, and manages the neat trick of actually making the Daleks interesting for fucking once) and is working on completing his next film, High Rise, due for release next year. High Rise, with its agitprop premise and leading role for walking lady-boner Tom Hiddleston, suggests Wheatley’s best chance yet at a crossover hit.
But, honestly, who cares if the mainstream ever figures out Ben Wheatley? Sure it would be nice if he had a nice big hit to guarantee him creative freedom for years, but he’s long since proven that he can make a great movie with next-to-no resources.
It’s a better, richer world for having Ben Wheatley and his team in it. If there’s a lesson to be taken from his career thus far, it’s that there is still a place for small, smart and utterly unique films in the cinematic landscape, films rooted in a singular perspective that twists genre and narrative as needed.
The other lesson? If you are alone in a field and happen to see a dark, ill-defined figure looming closer and closer, run the fuck away and thank me later.
