While Ben Wheatley‘s remake of Rebecca (2020) was occupying the critics (most of them didn’t care for it), the writer-director was setting up a much lower-key return to the “folk horror” of Kill List (2011) and particularly that psychedelic strand of the form he dabbled with in A Field in England (2013). Written quickly and shot over just 15 days in August 2020, between UK COVID-19 lockdowns, In the Earth very quickly proved divisive, angering as many as it pleased, complaints mainly revolving around the supposedly incomprehensible plot – though in truth, conventional stories have rarely interested Wheatley and anyone familiar with the two films mentioned earlier will know more or less what to expect from In the Earth.
Scientist Martin Lowery (Joel Fry) emerges from a four-month isolation during a deadly worldwide pandemic to accompany park ranger Alma (Ellora Torchia) on a mission into deep woods near Bristol to check up on his former colleague and lover Dr Dr Olivia Wendle (Hayley Squires) who has been experimenting in ways to us mycorrhiza to increase crop efficiency. Before setting off, he learns of the local legend of Parnag Fegg, a spirit that supposedly lives in the woods. As they venture further into the forest, Martin develops a ring-shaped rash on his arm and he and Alma are attacked by someone or something that destroys their camp. They’re taken in by the seemingly amenable Zach (Reece Shearsmith), an eccentric who lives alone in the forest. But he drugs them, amputates Martin’s toes after they become infected and poses their unconscious bodies for ritualistic photographs. The couple escape and make it to Olivia’s base where they find that she’s been trying to make contact with Parnag Fegg using sound and light. But there’s more going on in the woods than Martin and Alma first realised.
Very much of the moment, it’s a more ambitious film than most of the shot-in-lockdown films which, Host (2020) notwithstanding, tended to be mostly pretty hopeless (yes Corona Zombies (2020), we still haven’t forgotten you…) Because of the temporary relaxing of restrictions, Wheatley was able to on location for a start and by keeping his cast as small as possible – after the first couple of minutes there are only four actors on screen – he was able to shoot quickly and safely, getting the film finished in time for a world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival on 29 January.
In the opening moments Wheatley neatly contrasts the tedium and anxiety of pandemic mandated isolation (the virus is never explicitly identified as COVID-19) that Martin and Alma have left behind with the more immediate and even more primal terrors of the woods. Disappointingly, the fact that the world is gripped by a pandemic is largely forgotten (it’s a zeitgeisty touch that could date the film faster than anything else) after the first act as the film ventures instead into the psychedelic and deeply weird territory that Wheatley has been mapping for some time – Alma’s spore-induced freak out in particular recalls the similarly trippy psychedelia of A Field in England.
Shearsmith is the highest profile name in the cast, and he rises to the occasion admirably, initially seemingly friendly and accommodating, quickly showing his true colours, drugging his guests and posing their unconscious bodies for arcane photographs. He gets to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke (“photography is like magic, really. But then so is all technology when you don’t know how it works”) and a scene with him wielding an axe in the vicinity of Martin’s injured toes is brilliantly staged by both cast and director. Fry and Torchia are likable audience identification figures (we actually care enough about them to hope that they make it all alive) and Squires (from Peter Strickland’s equally odd and marvellous In Fabric (2018)) is spot-on as the hard to read and ultimately treacherous Wendle.
If the film falters it’s in its annoying refusal to engage with some of its more intriguing ideas, a victim perhaps of the speed at which the script was written and the film was shot. The “mycorrhizal mat,” which Wendle suggests might extend across the whole of Great Britain and which the film hints may be sentient in a way impossible for us to really understand, turns out not to be as important to the plot as it first seems and Wheatley raises some intriguing business about the differing approaches to religion and the supernatural taken by art and science (Zach and Wendle both try to communicate with “the thing in the woods” in their own equally demented and delusional ways) recalling some of the work of Nigel Kneale, but again it ends up going nowhere in particular.
But a film like In the Earth stands or falls more on its atmosphere than on its script and in that respect, it succeeds admirably. Nick Gillespie’s gorgeous photography – alternately claustrophobic and highly suggestive of the loneliness of the forests and open countryside – and a wonderfully unsettling ambient score from frequent Wheatley collaborator and former Pop Will Eat Itself singer Clint Mansell conspire, in true ” folk horror” fashion, to make the seemingly endless woods just outside Bristol even more frightening and unwelcoming than ever (“people get a bit funny in the wood sometimes.”) As the mysterious fog bank moves around the perimeter of Wendle’s camp, the forest is transformed into a truly alien and barely glimpsed world.
In the Earth is to be applauded for its ambition and Wheatley deserves the highest praise for getting anything together at all under the most trying of circumstances. It feels as much a reaction against the bigger budget of Rebecca filing off some of Wheatley‘s quirks and peculiarities (though he managed to sneak in a dash of his trademark weirdness via a dream sequence) and was a welcome return to the more adventurous and cerebral work he was best regarded for. For all its flaws it’s a fascinating, thought provoking and enjoyable off-kilter film though it’s not hard to understand why it so divided viewers – as with Kill List and A Field in England, it’s certainly a horror film, but not one that wants to fit into any conventional idea of what a genre film should be. It plays by its own very arcane rules and does so admirably.
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