In the Earth (2021)

 Score: 3.5 / 5

Ben Wheatley is back, baby! After his disastrous attempt at mainstream fare in Rebecca on Netflix, Wheatley returns to the form he has perfected. That's not to say it's perfect, and generally speaking his aesthetic isn't my cuppa, but its peculiarities mark it as canon among the filmmaker's signature works like Kill List and High-Rise. Wheatley movies are seemingly made for my people: artsy-farsty weirdos who, in the middle of the week, like watching challenging and often unsatisfying films in small, intimate groups while the wine is flowing; discussion may follow, but probably won't bypass the "and what the heck was that moment about?" commentary. It's the midnight arthouse kind of earned pretentiousness that I find dazzling only when it's about something horrific. Like In the Earth. 

Despite a relative lack of scares, Wheatley's latest might be one of his more accessible genre films. It's certainly his timeliest. Dr. Martin Lowery (played by an effectively miserable Joel Fry) is on a mission in a world gone awry. As a deadly pandemic rages, forcing people to learn how to live with it, he journeys to a remote government outpost in a dense forest. Meeting up with park ranger Alma (Ellora Torchia), the two embark on a two-day trek to find Dr. Olivia Wendle (Hayley Squires), who has been missing for months after turning off her radio. Wendle has been working with fungi and plants to improve crop growth, and has theorized that the natural world is sentient and communicates through a psychic network of roots and spores.

Before you start counting, I'll start. The references here abound, and it's easy to get distracted. Apocalyptic plants? The Happening. A journey into rural crazyville? Heart of Darkness. A mysterious monolith that might be sentient? 2001: A Space Odyssey. Shocking brutality and anguish in a world devoid of rationality or morality? Take your pick, but The Texas Chain Saw Massacre isn't a far cry. Wheatley knows how to make an effective, low-budget movie that feels expensive, and gloomy forests that just might be the home of supernatural horrors is right up his alley. From these examples, you pretty much know what's going to happen, but that doesn't stop you from giving in to this movie's hypnotic seduction.

Apart from plenty of kaleidoscopic hallucinations -- which we are made to experience along with the characters -- there isn't too much chaos in this film. An otherwise linear story is layered thickly with references, themes, and ideas that individually would make interesting movies but altogether make a muddy sort of fever dream. Possibilities, in Wheatley flicks, tend to matter more than reality, and impressions matter more than expressions. Discussions range from the scientific use of death (fungus) to increase life (crops) to the effect of the Malleus Maleficarum on Western civilization, and if that doesn't prime your head for a wild trip, you're probably already on shrooms.

Of course the woodland trek goes badly, but then it gets worse. And worse again. And bad things keep happening. There's a hostage situation with a wackadoo hermit, there's a prolonged chase, and there's some particularly gory dismemberment. There's a hazmat suit and there's white ceremonial robes, there's a bow and arrow and an axe (and a very dangerous hook). There's pre-Christian folklore, lots of blood, and an obsession with rounded openings (eyes, wounds, holes). There's speakers and strobe lights in the middle of the woods, and there's a fog of spores that rings a clearing. What do we make of all this? I guess it doesn't much matter, because that's Wheatley's job. More than once I was reminded of the 1979 Soviet film Stalker, mostly because of the weird mixture of psychology and science fiction in the woods, but Wheatley seemed to want to do it with something like Leatherface as the titular stalker.

And when they do finally find Dr. Wendle, she's about as terrifying as anything you might expect, clearly unhinged but confined under respectable layers of purpose and education and civility. She delivers some intense exposition in terms of character -- regarding her past relationships with both Martin and the batshit crazy, violent hermit Zach (Reece Shearsmith) -- and in terms of theme and plot, as she reveals that her research has bent away from agriculture and toward an eldritch guardian of the woods. Science, after all, is just the modern verbiage for magic. And when you see the unholy but very interesting experiments Wendle is enacting, it's easy to feel, for even the briefest of moments, that she might be onto something real. After the last year of our lives, aren't we all a bit desperate to try anything if it helps us all reconnect? Remember the joy we felt last spring when we saw images and read data about nature healing itself as we all locked down? Shouldn't we still yearn for that?

There's a bit of a bloodbath climax, which is nice, but then the movie just sort of ends. Leave it to Wheatley to make us scramble for comprehension and meaning after throwing so much at us, but I confess to hoping for a bit more cohesion. If the various and varied elements of this movie fit together, it's largely without clear logic or connections; that's okay, but it does leave one feeling distinctly unsatisfied. Then again, why should we feel satisfied in a movie -- in a world -- so messed up that even looking for answers will leave you brutalized, bewildered, and ultimately lost in the woods?