Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
There is a plague in England the plague that we happen to be living through, as writer/director Ben Wheatley started writing the script for In the Earth, early in the 2020 lockdown. As such, it s a quarantine film that actually captures the world we re living in, of surgical masks and nasal swabs and social distancing.
The extreme caution and danger that the plague dictates adds an extra layer of threat to In the Earth, a film that draws from a deep well of horror references, from Frankenstein to The Wicker Man. Wheatley has dabbled in folk horror before, notably in Kill List and A Field in England, but the subgenre, which grapples with the clash of the ancient and the modern, is especially suited to a story like In the Earth, troubled by mysterious rhythms of the earth, and their affect on the human body and mind. Just when it seems like nature is out to get us, Ben Wheatley reminds us that, indeed, it is. Unless it s just us.
real world of the COVID-obsessed left for the last year.
Perched on the razor-thin boundary between lucidity and madness, it gnaws at the nerves and bludgeons the senses until submission to humanity’s helplessness in the face of the ancient world’s elemental power is the only recourse.
Again, hello, lefties.
Ben Wheatley’s forest horror IN THE EARTH not much there there, despite starting with one of the better evocations of life during a pandemic https://t.co/7Uq13jGgnq
Here’s more, via Yahoo:
[“In the Earth” revolves around] Martin Lowery (Joel Fry), an unassuming researcher who arrives at a remote English facility where pandemic protocols are the order of the day.
"In the Earth," a new horror film written and directed by Ben Wheatley, is a quarantine film that actually captures the world we’re living in, of surgical masks and nasal swabs and social distancing.
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In the Earth, you’ve got to love a film that sets itself up to be visionary and gross, as well as embodying a dialectical conflict. On one side are the ancient mysteries of the earth sacrifices, gods, pagan magick. On the other is the reach of science frequencies, patterns, recurrence. The mind and the body have to work together to map out the sensory unease afoot in these woods, and writer-director Ben Wheatley skews toward the psychotropic earthiness of his
A Field in England in this modern horror epic, made during the pandemic, but compelling COVID-19 to act under another name. Wheatley is a fascinating director, weathering even the fake-out grenade of problematicism that last year s
âIn the Earthâ Review: Grassroots Horror
Ben Wheatley gets back to basics with this horror movie conceived during the pandemic.
Ellora Torchia, right, with Joel Fry in âIn the Earth.âCredit.Neon
In the Earth
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Movies evolve, and one day it will be possible to look at âIn the Earthâ and not see the contingencies of pandemic filmmaking. The director, Ben Wheatley, started writing it at the beginning of the lockdown in Britain, and elements of the finished product â the outdoor setting; references to quarantine, a third wave and a disease ravaging a city; the actorsâ surgical masks at the beginning â bear unavoidable hallmarks of the past year.