A Field in England

A Field in England (from Weird and Wonderful II: Fifty More Cult Films by George Hughes, available from www.freefall-productions.com) 

2013 / UK / 90 minutes

“I shall consume all the ill fortune which you are set to unleash! I shall chew up all the selfish, scheming and ill intentions that men like you force upon men like me!”

Director: Ben Wheatley / Screenplay: Amy Jump / Director of Photography: Laurie Rose / Music: Jim Williams / Production: Claire Jones for Film 4 / Cast: Reece Shearsmith (Whitehead), Michael Smiley (O’Neil), Peter Ferdinando (Jacob), Richard Glover (“Friend“), Ryan Cope (Cutler), Julian Barratt (Trower).

During the English Civil War, Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith), an “Alchemist’s Assistant” and a soldier, Cutler (Ryan Cope), flee a battle through a hedge into an empty field. There, Whitehead and Cutler meet two other deserters: Jacob (Peter Ferdinando) and “Friend” (Richard Glover).

   Cutler leads them through the field, promising that there is an alehouse nearby. After stopping to eat some mushrooms they find, the four deserters are met by an Irishman, O’Neil (Michael Smiley), who seemingly appears out of the ground and claims to be a wizard.

   Whilst “Friend” says he’s “Not surprised the Devil is an Irishman”, Whitehead realises that O’Neil is the rival alchemist who stole several of his employer’s documents. However, O’Neil is able to influence and control the deserters (except Whitehead), especially as the hallucinogenic mushrooms take effect, and instructs them to start digging for treasure he claims is buried in the field…

   Ben Wheatley’s surreal and extremely cryptic black and white historical nightmare, A Field in England only gets weirder from there- with the characters turning on and killing each other, coming back from the dead, digging up a mysterious skull and never making it to the alehouse.

   Set in the same underfilmed period as Matthew Reeves’ closely related rural psychological horror Witchfinder General (1968), Wheatley’s low budget psychedelic puzzle is open to numerous interpretations. But even if your conclusion is that none of it actually means anything, it’s still an intensely hypnotic and atmospherically unforgettable experience, especially considering it was all accomplished with just six beardy types talking bollocks in the Surrey countryside.

   Shot very quickly over just a few days with the small, all male cast (the sixth character is Julian Barratt’s Trower- the officer killed in the first couple of minutes), A Field in England features a lot of unwieldy period dialogue (screenwriter Amy Jump extensively researched the old English that soldiers in the Civil War would have spoken) and even more unearthly disturbing imagery.

   That said, there’s a lot of genuinely funny dark humour too- especially from “Friend”, initially presented as the thickest of the group but often accidentally summing things up with some quite profound statements (“I’ve worked out what God’s punishing us for: Everything!”) and delivering some wonderfully heartfelt last words when he dies (for the first time, anyway).

   The main criticism of the film is that it all seems to be building up to something in the final act but the only payoff is that everything just goes even crazier when Whitehead finally stands up to O’Neil. For what it’s worth, the most likely explanation for the whole thing is that the characters died in the battle at the start, the field is purgatory and the alehouse they never get to would be heaven. 

   But at the end of the day, A Field in England is more about the experience than the meaning (as Whitehead points out when the “Treasure” turns out to be a load of old bones, “Maybe it was our friendship”). Wheatley and Jump got much bigger budget (but stayed pretty weird) with their next film, High- Rise (2015), an impressive adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s supposedly “Unfilmable” 1975 dystopian novel that wisely kept things in an alternate past rather than an updated Sci- Fi future.

   The higher profile of the (ultimately, just as divisive) later film led to wider audiences discovering A Field in England, which largely disappeared after a release every bit as experimental as its content (it opened in cinemas, was broadcast on TV and got put out on DVD all on the same day- Friday 5th July, 2013) but, to this day, nobody’s quite sure what it’s all about…