(Ben Wheatley, 2013)
Seemingly aiming for a very modern mash-up of Jodorowsky, the Wyrd Albion horror movies of the '70s (Witchfinder General and Blood on Satan's Claw, most obviously), Tarkovsky's Stalker, The Wicker Man, The Trip, Winstanley and Peter Watkins' Culloden, Wheatley's fourth feature is a technically masterful psychedelic odyssey.
Set, as so few films are, during the English Civil War, it focuses on a battle-weary group of men crossing the fields of the West Country who come under the influence of Michael Smiley's sinister, commanding necromancer O'Neill (in the first real hallucinatory moment, the men literally drag him into the film on the end of a thick rope). Starving, the men eat the many mushrooms growing around the field Smiley is searching for buried gold, and as he works to psychologically manipulate and destroy the meek scholar Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith), the psychedelics really kick in and the men appear to drift inexorably into insanity.
Gloriously shot on a small budget in crisp monochrome by Laurie Rose, the film is almost entirely set in that field, and as such there is just a whiff of tv production about it. All the fog and smoke drifting across the screen cannot disguise the limited scope of action here, nor can it really distract from the absence of any real substance.
Wheatley, whose filmography grows more interesting with each film, shoots and cuts the whole thing with inventive, punkish energy, and the score, with its pagan, tribal drumming, is compelling. Some of the men's desperate, increasingly fevered exchanges are interesting, and the performances by the entire cast - particularly Smiley - are impressive. The central freak-out, when the black and white imagery intensifies and strobe effects cut the film up into a nightmarish assault on the senses, is a fantastic passage of pure cinema.
But it all amounts to very little. It plays like it was made by somebody who wanted to make a cool little cultish oddity, and knew exactly how to deliver that, but had absolutely nothing to say.
Which is fine, and the film is enjoyable on a purely sensory level. But I can't help but feel that it is also something of a missed opportunity.
Showing posts with label Ben Wheatley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ben Wheatley. Show all posts
Friday, 5 July 2013
Sunday, 23 December 2012
SIGHTSEERS
(Ben Wheatley, 2012)
There's a rare interest in Wheatley's work in the ancient Britain still visible underneath the edges of the modern nation. It's there in his last film, the superb horror thriller Kill List, which focuses on that old, weird pagan Island by depicting the strangeness of the modern landscape - the anonymity of new towns and retail parks, industrial estates and motorway hotels - in contrast with the corn fields, woodland and the wildlife that has been around for centuries. The horrific finale of that film shifts explicitly into pagan territory.
Sightseers is a very different film; written by its stars Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, its an extremely black comedy following their characters, Chris and Tina, a relatively new couple, as they take a trip through Northern England in a caravan, enjoying such attractions as the Blue John Cavern and a pencil museum. Along the way, Tina learns that Chris is a murderer who "just wants to be feared and respected", but is not above beating to death anybody who annoys him. Tina embraces her own homicidal side as they go, but tensions begin to effect their relationship too...
The travelogue structure allows Wheatley to depict that pagan Britain once again, as his characters trudge across fields, hug sacred stones, follow ley-lines, witness shamans sacrifice chickens, and visit ancient caves. Apart from the prologue, set in Alice's midlands home, where her domineering mother is appalled by their plans, urban Britain is entirely ignored by Sightseers. Instead, Wheatley ensures that the often grim landscapes of Yorkshire and Humberside look desolately stunning throughout; magnificently bleak in some scenes, and charmingly dull in others.
But the core of the film is the relationship between the two leads. Lowe and Oram are both fabulous here; funny and convincing, making their near-Dickensian caricatures feel more like living and breathing people than they have any right to. That's a problem with the film in general; so many of the middle class characters they encounter (and kill) are merely tissue-thin stereotypes it strains credulity and interest.
Countering that, Wheatley and his writer-performers try out a grab-bag of comic approaches. Here we get a bit of classic social awkwardness/comedy of embarrassment, a little slapstick, much grotesque violence played purely for laughs, some hilarious deadpan dialogue, and many quirkily memorable comic details. It variously recalls Nuts In May, Withnail & I and much recent dark British tv comedy. It mostly works, even if it runs out of steam some way before the end, and its not really saying much of anything beyond some generally clumsy light satire aimed at the British middle classes.
But it looks nice, has a great soundtrack - cover versions of Donovan's "Season of the Witch" memorably play over two of the murders - and Wheatley's direction is typically superb, as are the cast.
There's a rare interest in Wheatley's work in the ancient Britain still visible underneath the edges of the modern nation. It's there in his last film, the superb horror thriller Kill List, which focuses on that old, weird pagan Island by depicting the strangeness of the modern landscape - the anonymity of new towns and retail parks, industrial estates and motorway hotels - in contrast with the corn fields, woodland and the wildlife that has been around for centuries. The horrific finale of that film shifts explicitly into pagan territory.
Sightseers is a very different film; written by its stars Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, its an extremely black comedy following their characters, Chris and Tina, a relatively new couple, as they take a trip through Northern England in a caravan, enjoying such attractions as the Blue John Cavern and a pencil museum. Along the way, Tina learns that Chris is a murderer who "just wants to be feared and respected", but is not above beating to death anybody who annoys him. Tina embraces her own homicidal side as they go, but tensions begin to effect their relationship too...
The travelogue structure allows Wheatley to depict that pagan Britain once again, as his characters trudge across fields, hug sacred stones, follow ley-lines, witness shamans sacrifice chickens, and visit ancient caves. Apart from the prologue, set in Alice's midlands home, where her domineering mother is appalled by their plans, urban Britain is entirely ignored by Sightseers. Instead, Wheatley ensures that the often grim landscapes of Yorkshire and Humberside look desolately stunning throughout; magnificently bleak in some scenes, and charmingly dull in others.
But the core of the film is the relationship between the two leads. Lowe and Oram are both fabulous here; funny and convincing, making their near-Dickensian caricatures feel more like living and breathing people than they have any right to. That's a problem with the film in general; so many of the middle class characters they encounter (and kill) are merely tissue-thin stereotypes it strains credulity and interest.
Countering that, Wheatley and his writer-performers try out a grab-bag of comic approaches. Here we get a bit of classic social awkwardness/comedy of embarrassment, a little slapstick, much grotesque violence played purely for laughs, some hilarious deadpan dialogue, and many quirkily memorable comic details. It variously recalls Nuts In May, Withnail & I and much recent dark British tv comedy. It mostly works, even if it runs out of steam some way before the end, and its not really saying much of anything beyond some generally clumsy light satire aimed at the British middle classes.
But it looks nice, has a great soundtrack - cover versions of Donovan's "Season of the Witch" memorably play over two of the murders - and Wheatley's direction is typically superb, as are the cast.
Saturday, 10 September 2011
KILL LIST
(Ben Wheatley, 2011)
Right from the off, the score and sound design make Kill List a gruelling, intense experience. The images and narrative present us with a family in the semi-rural outer suburbs of an English City. A nice, large enough house and garden don't prevent tension between husband and wife, and they argue bitterly a couple of times in the first act, her furious at his refusal to work and bring in more money, him nursing some trauma from a mercenary job in Kiev. The style edges close to poetic realism, the dialogue semi-improvised, the performances casual and authentic-seeming.
But the soundtrack tells us that something else is going on: washes of industrial feedback seep out, prolonged mists of quietened white noise play almost subliminally, disturbing synthesiser tones and low, eerie squeals and screams echo low down in the mix. Then a supporting character casually and bafflingly carves a rune in the back of a bathroom mirror and the seed of unease is decisively sown. The film becomes a brooding hit man thriller, though one always insistent upon the banality of the World these men move in, following them as they work their way through the titular list, finding what looks like a child pornography ring and dispatching some targets in scenes of extraordinary gore and visceral impact: a hammer is taken to a skull, a face smashed in against a wall. But things get weirder and more complicated and the ending, which is built to in a few scenes of escalating terror, is a gut-wrenching horror scenario, resonant and beautiful in an awful and devastating way.
The scenes of banal domesticity early on ground the film and together with director Wheatley's intimate style - lots of handheld close-ups and obtuse cutaways to the tellingly messy details of these characters everyday environments - mean that when the later violence and horror erupt we are shaken by the way they tear into the surface of this recognisable, ordinary world. That the sound design means a sense of dread runs throughout gives the many scenes of the industrial outskirts and forgotten urban spaces a disturbing cast. Never have old lock-ups, suburban cottages and chain hotels seemed so convincingly sinister. This is a film partly about the way we can still glimpse the old, weird, pagan England peeking out around the edges of "exurbia". It's there in the protagonist cooking and eating the rabbit his cat has left slashed and dead in his back garden. And there in the shot of him in the solitary lit window of a nocturnal
travelodge, waving at the inexplicable sight of his partners ex, standing in the middle of the countryside in a dinner dress and waving at him. And there too in Wheatley's slow motion sequence of the family play-fighting in the garden, a piece of foreshadowing at its subtlest and most creepy.
Gripping, intelligently played and told, shot by a filmmaker with his own style and concerns, and finally, bleakly devastating, Kill List is a brilliant British genre film.
Right from the off, the score and sound design make Kill List a gruelling, intense experience. The images and narrative present us with a family in the semi-rural outer suburbs of an English City. A nice, large enough house and garden don't prevent tension between husband and wife, and they argue bitterly a couple of times in the first act, her furious at his refusal to work and bring in more money, him nursing some trauma from a mercenary job in Kiev. The style edges close to poetic realism, the dialogue semi-improvised, the performances casual and authentic-seeming.
But the soundtrack tells us that something else is going on: washes of industrial feedback seep out, prolonged mists of quietened white noise play almost subliminally, disturbing synthesiser tones and low, eerie squeals and screams echo low down in the mix. Then a supporting character casually and bafflingly carves a rune in the back of a bathroom mirror and the seed of unease is decisively sown. The film becomes a brooding hit man thriller, though one always insistent upon the banality of the World these men move in, following them as they work their way through the titular list, finding what looks like a child pornography ring and dispatching some targets in scenes of extraordinary gore and visceral impact: a hammer is taken to a skull, a face smashed in against a wall. But things get weirder and more complicated and the ending, which is built to in a few scenes of escalating terror, is a gut-wrenching horror scenario, resonant and beautiful in an awful and devastating way.
The scenes of banal domesticity early on ground the film and together with director Wheatley's intimate style - lots of handheld close-ups and obtuse cutaways to the tellingly messy details of these characters everyday environments - mean that when the later violence and horror erupt we are shaken by the way they tear into the surface of this recognisable, ordinary world. That the sound design means a sense of dread runs throughout gives the many scenes of the industrial outskirts and forgotten urban spaces a disturbing cast. Never have old lock-ups, suburban cottages and chain hotels seemed so convincingly sinister. This is a film partly about the way we can still glimpse the old, weird, pagan England peeking out around the edges of "exurbia". It's there in the protagonist cooking and eating the rabbit his cat has left slashed and dead in his back garden. And there in the shot of him in the solitary lit window of a nocturnal
travelodge, waving at the inexplicable sight of his partners ex, standing in the middle of the countryside in a dinner dress and waving at him. And there too in Wheatley's slow motion sequence of the family play-fighting in the garden, a piece of foreshadowing at its subtlest and most creepy.
Gripping, intelligently played and told, shot by a filmmaker with his own style and concerns, and finally, bleakly devastating, Kill List is a brilliant British genre film.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)