4 out of 5

Directed by: Ben Wheatley

Recommendations for watching a Ben Wheatley movie:

1. Watch once, expecting to not hear half of the mumbled, mixed-at-the-same-level-as-everything-else dialogue, and expecting to feel like you missed something important when you looked away from the screen for a split second.
2. Watch again with subtitles, and be floored by how precise and important everything suddenly seems.

If you go in planning to do eventually do #2, it makes #1 a lot more enjoyable.  Indeed, upon a first viewing of A Field in England (before I’d decided to rewatch it), I wasn’t really sure what to think.  I felt like I got the gist – whether it was actually vague or just touched on in those “missed something important” moments I mentioned – of a gang of lost souls, going through trials and tribulations in a limbo-like field in England during the English Civil War, but, like Kill List, I was left wondering if that’s all there was to it.  Unlike that film – which could, in many ways, be seen as a warm up for the accomplishments here – I was almost certain that wasn’t all there was, as there were too many purposefully odd compositions through Field to excuse as just a tonal experiment.  There’s the notable psychedelic freak-out near the film’s conclusion (brought on by a character’s mushroom trip), but there are also plenty of strange moments where we stop and focus on: a man trying to poop, or people pulling on a rope, or “freeze frames” where the frame isn’t actually frozen, everyone’s just holding a pose.  And the setup is far too narrow to assume that these are midnight movie indulges.  …On that second viewing, pieces slide together, and the intentional construction of the film is (mostly) revealed.  To swing back around to the Kill List comparison, satisfyingly, this isn’t just a mystery with some connective tissue; A Field in England offers a whole lot to chew on.

Of course, I wouldn’t dare recommend those steps if the movie wasn’t enthralling on its own terms.  To Wheatley’s (and writer Amy Jump’s) massive credit, AFiE is mesmerizing, even as it confuses.  And though most of the reviews are focusing on its ill omens, the movie is downright funny, combining some of the dark humor of Sightseers with almost a Three Stooges-esque slapstick, often relegated to the background while more serious matters are discussed up front.  On the one hand, this can be distracting: are you supposed to laugh, or are you supposed to be thinking about what’s churning ‘neath the surface?  On the other hand, it seems Wheatley is purposefully disarming us, setting us off-balance so that all of those other oddities can be slipped in to the film and feel at home.

A Field in England is about a group of deserters who are coerced – via drugs, via gun – into first locating, then finding, a man in said field.  This man, a necromancer, wears a cape and makes threats, and soon has all digging for some rumored treasure in the same field.  Endless, gorgeously sparse and yet rich shots of a wind-swept field; an unnervingly rattling – and then suddenly chipper – score; flat but sharp cinematography that allows us to absorb the full frame without any trickery.  Not much “happens” in AFiE, and the movie never leaves that field, perhaps in more ways than one.  Some of Wheatley’s habits are still on display here, with conversation so casual as to all pass through a filter without being able to decipher what’s important and what’s not, and a lingering editing style that slinks from scene to scene.  But this is also a grand culmination of those habits into a mightily realized conceptual film.  It undoubtedly has its hiccups and tests of endurance, and benefits from a subsequent viewing.  It’s also the first Ben Wheatley film that I didn’t have to ask whether or not I enjoyed it, only whether I wanted to watch it again now or later.

(I chose now.)