[[Note: When "In the Earth" releases in the U.S., it will largely be at indoor movie theaters during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. While the purpose of this review goes deeper than binary recommendation to discuss the film's merits as an artistic work in context of its time, we encourage our readers to continue exercising the latest safety guidelines from health authorities and consider them if and when you may decide to visit the cinema to watch this movie.]]
One of the best pandemic movies of the COVID-19 era never mentions the words “pandemic” or “COVID-19.” But if the masks, hand sanitizer and obscure references to a crisis keeping people indoors aren’t strong enough indicators of the acidic irony that’s to be found in the DNA of Ben Wheatley’s “In the Earth,” perhaps its looming scream of dark-hearted, sensation-colliding hysteria born in physical isolation will be.
The English filmmaker’s latest resides along that same strange something’s-amiss-here wavelength which encompassed his earlier works before the safety nets of bigger budgets and A-list talent softened his edge; not since 2013’s “A Field in England'' has Wheatly managed to stay so far ahead of us on the jagged cinematic expeditions he loves to lead us on, instead of us being comfortably ahead of him. Here the setting is a misty forest that feels closer to the end of the world than the prime spot for a casual weekend getaway, and it’s impossible not to have a laugh at distributor NEON’s decision to release this upsetting jaunt at a point when more and more Americans are confidently venturing outside for the first time in over a year. The world isn’t familiar, “In the Earth” suggests with its concussive aesthetics and invisible menace, and perhaps it never has been.
If there’s one thing Wheatley excels at, it’s starting from a place of benign normalcy and ending somewhere so irrevocably contradictory you’d think the director had a chronic case of change-of-heart midway through his productions. The unlucky souls discovering that out for themselves here are Joel Fry’s Martin, an agriculturalist of sorts heading out to a former colleague’s research post, and Ellora Torchia’s Alma, the guide tasked with bringing him there. This most simple of partnerships might lull the Wheatley uninitiated into a false sense of security if it weren’t for the abundance of hints in the opening minutes that something nefarious awaits in the forest; early mentions of “very special, unusually fertile land” and a fabled “spirit of the woods” and one character’s casually mentioning how “people get a bit funny in the woods sometimes” naturally snag our attention.
Given how notorious Wheatley is for gleefully (and violently) overstating things, the fact “In the Earth” begins with so much of what we’ll soon realize was understatement once blood is spilled and strange rituals undertaken signals a return to the filmmaker’s utterly perplexing foundational sensibilities. His newest work – which releases Friday following its Sundance debut earlier this year – manages to be more small-scale and yet more psychedelically expansive than anything he’s done before. It’s also, ultimately, the most profoundly consequential movie he’s made to date; there’s real purpose to the trademark maximalism Wheatley provides here, instead of our simply appreciating the chaotic lengths he aspires to.
Purpose is something Martin seems to be searching for as well; Fry imbues the researcher with a potent hesitancy and vulnerability, and his fortitude will be tested many times over. While a certain missed opportunity in Martin’s past will come to bear later in the plot, who he and Alma are is less important for our investment than the horrors they’re soon to endure after taking off on their multi-day stroll—and who they might become because of it. That dread manifests for the duo psychologically, illogically, mentally and, in the case of Martin, a most unlucky streak of foot injuries so gruesome you might end up tossing your Birkenstocks in the trash.
If Fry’s tortured screams don’t sear themselves into your brain, then the eccentric characters they come across – Reece Shearsmith’s Zach and Hayley Squires’s Dr. Olivia Wendle – surely will. As straight-faced as they are suspicious, these denizens of the forest are more of apiece with the zealotry-consumed protagonists of Wheatley features past. It shouldn’t be considered a spoiler to say Zach isn’t who he may seem (anyone who’s watched a thriller before will suspect Zach the moment he enters the story), but “In the Earth” finds white-knuckle momentum in the way Wheatley threads Shearsmith’s darkly comic performance with the inhumanity of someone willing to do anything to make contact with the ambiguous presence which may or may not reign over the surrounding forest. Among “In the Earth’s” many disturbing ideas – none of them completely fleshed out, but limiting them to mere suggestion is part of the point – is how the journey to know the unknowable may destroy us more thoroughly than the epiphany.
The horror-show spiral Zach leads Alma and Martin into – one of gore, finely crafted tension and a boatload of unanswered questions – takes up the middle act of a cleanly segmented movie, but it’s the final third that brings “In the Earth’s” thematic intentions into clearer focus amid an increasingly audacious audiovisual design; the film’s flashiest (literally) sequence feels like “2001” by way of Cronenberg, all pupil-widening flashing lights, hallucinogenic textures and liquid transitions. There’s a whiff of Ari Aster and a heftier dose of Alex Garland, but more than simply borrowing from his more well-known genre contemporaries, Wheatley seems to be making an intriguing attempt to compromise between them—the former’s humanist terror, the latter’s fascination with scientific fascination. Fascinatingly, what he ends up depicting – personified in the antagonists Martin and Alma encounter – are extreme contrasts in the processes of science and art, fashioned into questions of humans’ obsessive pursuit of truth. Is truth manufactured or discovered? Can our obsession in finding it ever be justified?
Wheatley’s screenplay wavers in terms of the subtlety he deploys to explore those questions, but even at their most overwrought his methods are interesting, such as when ambiguous monologuing gives way to final-act exposition dumps that will no doubt test viewers’ patience. Clarity isn’t something the viewer should expect when watching “In the Earth,” an attribute of the movie which sometimes finds it bristling against its own writing. For a movie whose devious concepts are at their most horrific when centered on the cosmic nature of human insignificance, there’s too many moments during “In the Earth’s” climax when it insists on drawing certain plot conveniences. “I wouldn’t try to make any logical sense of it,” a character says at one point, a meta piece of advice Christopher Nolan would appreciate. But like “Tenet,” “In the Earth” sometimes bogs down its own free-wheeling creativity in unnecessary semantics. At its most unsettling, the film conveys a sense that all its schematics are ultimately useless for its characters and their increasingly dire station.
What festers in the mind as the credits roll are the movie’s primal ambiguities, and a lingering itchy satisfaction that Wheatley has tapped into something undecipherable but surely acknowledged over the past year about humanity being at the mercy of that which we can never totally understand. The more terrifying consideration is perhaps better left unanswered: Would we even want to?
"In the Earth" is rated R for strong violence content, grisly images and language. It releases Friday in some theaters.
Starring: Joel Fry, Ellora Torchia, Reece Shearsmith, Hayley Squires
Directed by Ben Wheatley
2021
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