Creating horror has been and will always be a sociopolitical act and with In The Earth, British auteur Ben Wheatley reflects the reality of the pandemic back at us in startling, disorienting fashion. The result has notes of all kinds of horror, but most distinctly a tent-in-the-woods slasher crossed with Lovecraftian cosmic horror, all set to the backdrop of some airborne viral infection that’s driven the population into quarantine and starved them for a cure.
Designed like a bad trip, In the Earth is a raw-dogged audio-visual blitz that sees Wheatley genre hops in a way that calls back his best effort to date: Kill List. Set to a raucous soundscape that came to life when frequent Darren Aronofsky collaborator and composer Clint Mansell actually harnessed the natural vibrations of living plants to create the domineering, ethereal score (!!!), In The Earth is a wholly hallucinatory experience that threatens to throw audiences into a literal seizure, epileptic or no.
The plot itself, which Wheatley began writing the first day of COVID-19-imposed lockdown and shot in secrecy over the summer with a skeleton cast and crew, is fairly basic. Scientist Martin Lowery (Joel Fry) is on the hunt for a cure to a global virus and accompanied by park ranger Alma (Ellora Torchia) heads deep into the English wood to a verdant hideaway with promises of great scientific discoveries. There, a deranged idolater (Reece Shearsmith) lurks.
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In the Earth is Wheatley’s first proper horror outing since the beginning of his career and the hard-to-pin-down director just seems to be having a blast. Rallying game performances out of his dedicated ensemble and creating a COVID-friendly set that basically resembles a deep-woods rave (strobe lights fizzle and blink while bassy subwoofers strapped to trees boom throughout the night), Wheatley finds a way to pluck the comedic notes from Sightseers and match them to the dread-inducing tension of Kill List and the visceral mayhem of A Field in London. A series of squeamish body horror gags, including one character’s ongoing foot “issue”, is just aces.
Not dissimilar to Alex Garland’s Annihilation or Color Out of Space, In the Earth explores humanity’s symbiotic relationship to the environment and does it with just as much unbridled trippy effects. And though I’m not convinced there’s anything essential or groundbreaking in this particular viral parable beyond how isolation and quarantine drive people mad, the folksy horror and ax-wielding psychopathy of it all is nonetheless unsettling and just plain fun. And Wheatley doesn’t pardon the film’s abject psychedelic components – at one point there’s a fog made up of psycociblin mushroom spores – but he uses a swirling kaleidoscopic effect to drop us into the disoriented headspace of the characters. If In the Earth is proof perfect of anything it’s that if there’s ever a good time to go into the woods, do mushroom fog, and get chased by a psycho killer, it’s definitely during a global pandemic. Or at the very least, watch a movie about it.
CONCLUSION: Ben Wheatley’s return to horror uses the backdrop of a global pandemic to spin a folksy yarn about woodland killers and pagan worship that employs militant audio-visual hallucinogenic effects to entertain and disorient. A real return to form for Wheatley and the first movie to effectively tackle the virus and its effect on our collective sanity.
B+
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By: Matt Oakes
Started blogging about film in college when the university paper wouldn’t have him. Dislikes your consensus film Twitter favorites. Devotee of horror movies that make him die a little inside. Catches films at festivals when he can. Proud SFCS and OFCS member and Tomatometer-approved critic. Editor-in-chief of Silver Screen Riot.
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