In the Earth

Ben Wheatley’s ninth film, In the Earth, stalks similar territory to his first few. It’s a stripped-back affair—shot mid-pandemic in Maidenhead over the course of a couple of weeks—and makes efficient use of its very limited resources. At times, production limitations show as quality of image fluctuates from shot to shot. But, by and large, Wheatley’s editing finesses this sort of thing into a disjunctive, unpredictable, Frankenstein’s monster of a style. Much of this film feels as though it was discovered mid-process. Actors ad-lib, and narrative focus shifts and wobbles erratically.

In the Earth is ostensibly a horror, but beyond that it’s difficult to categorise or even describe. Its closest recent analogue is Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space. That film Nicholas Cage and family turn wibbly after a meteorite crashed in their back garden and contaminated its surroundings in grotesque ways. In the Earth inverts the dynamic. Our protagonists venture into a profaned forest, actively travelling towards evil. Like the caravan trip at the centre of Sightseers, the deeper they journey, the more primacy their surroundings take on. Elements of the environment puncture the protagonists’ bodies and minds. The territory invades them back.

We also meet two earlier casualties of the forest. Both have been stuck there for an interminable amount of time, and are lost in fruitless attempts to understand the forest. One practices idolatry, worship, and human sacrifice—and, at some point, gave up on receiving divine revelation in return. The other conducts experiments, measuring responses to light and sound—but has introduced some deeply unscientific ideas into their process. These characters turn out to be complementary halves of one whole. Through this the film draws parallels between mysticism and reason.

While these characters are conceptually interesting, their dialogue can come off overwritten. Frequent Wheatley co-writer Amy Jump doesn’t get a writing credit in this film—at a guess, logistics prevented her involvement from what was likely an on-the-set process. Wheatley doesn’t quite have her knack for dialogue, but he still gives it a respectable stab. Nothing approaches the giddy heights of A Field in England’s script, but there’s no real eye-rollers, and Wheatley's nasty sense of humour comes out at all the right moments.

Where In the Earth does equal A Field in England is in its formal experimentation. The film’s kaleidoscopic final act was a bit much for some audiences—but anyone with an interest in avant-garde cinema or video art will eat it up. Despite the undeniable patchiness of what precedes it, the film’s climax is an overwhelming and brilliant stretch. It’s like if Lis Rhodes was given a few thousand pounds and told to make Avengers 5; a bombastic, noisy, and brutal assault on the senses. You get such a battering it's hard to think straight afterwards. It might not be perfect, but by the time the credits roll on In the Earth you may feel transformed in ways you don't understand.

In the Earth is available to stream here. Bezos is already rich enough, so updates as and when on a better source.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Doctor Sleep

Rodney Ascher's 2012 documentary, Room 237, examines a litany of perspectives on Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. One interviewee even claims the film is a confession by Kubrick to a moon-landing hoax. It comes as no surprise that Room 237 got eyes rolling — even Stephen King's. But its aim was never to legitimise its talking heads' analyses. It instead exposed how eccentric and single-minded readings of Kubrick's film can get.

Nearly forty years have passed since the release of The Shining. Age has not diminished the film's power, its sense of mystery, or its uncanny and sickly tone. News of a sequel was, in consequence, met with trepidation. But Doctor Sleep, based on a King sequel of the same name, does not tarnish the original film's legacy.

The film's tone is one of quiet dread. Moments when its spring uncoils are few and far between — but this lends them incredible weight. The construction of this film's horror is near-impeccable, supported by impressive scoring and cinematography. Doctor Sleep is far from the train-wreck many feared — but it's orthodox, shallow, and risk-averse. It would be impossible to make a case for this film having anything to do with the moon landing.

Doctor Sleep is, for better or worse, a film in the spirit of King's novels. It speaks with the author's moralising, materialism and tendency towards sentiment. In Kubrick's film, the ghosts of the Overlook were flesh and blood; lit and blocked like the living. Their goals and hungers were undefinable. The antagonists of Doctor Sleep are vampires who dress and move like a carnival troupe, eyes glowing an empty blue. Its protagonists, by contrast, are good, pure, X-Men style psychics. Even the shining itself is now material, a ghostly smoke floating from mouths of its holders.

These features pose no significant problems in the first two acts of Doctor Sleep. The film does a decent job of drawing you into this new world, and manages to transcend the cheesiness of its concept. But its finale feels no more than a homage to Kubrick's iconic imagery. The Overlook involutes; a superficial ghost-train, shell of its former self. Kubrick's Shining was a hauntological exercise; King and director Mike Flanagan's Overlook is something more straight-laced. It's horror which can be understood; overcome. Its ghosts can be willed out of existence, locked in mental boxes; manipulated and used as strategic pieces.

The subtlety and strangeness of Kubrick's film is abandoned. Doctor Sleep treads the same ground, exploring the same themes in a more explicable way. In their new clarity, though, those themes are greatly diminished.

Doctor Sleep is in cinemas now.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

The World Will Shine Again. "Stephen King's Doctor Sleep" Only in Theaters November 8. ------- http://DoctorSleepMovie.com https://www.facebook.com/doctorsleepmovie/ https://www.twitter.com/DoctorSleepFilm https://www.instagram.com/DoctorSleepMovie ------- "Doctor Sleep" continues the story of Danny Torrance, 40 years after his terrifying stay at the Overlook Hotel in The Shining.

In Fabric

The UK defines itself cinematically by kitchen-sink social realism. By presenting us as a rainy and loveless land, the works of Mike Leigh and Cleo Barnard export well to Europe. And Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake scored the director his second Palme D'Or, an honour only seven others share. Even our television is aggressively dour. A visiting alien would think the UK contained only police officers, struggling single mothers and bailiffs. A few chefs, too. The whole thing is shot through with social conservativism and ‘poor cow’ commiserations.

Beneath this, however, has bubbled a long-standing tradition of experimentation and Gothic beauty. Britain's most iconic horror film, The Wicker Man, represents these two battling modes quite well. Woodward's Sergeant Howie is a moral absolutist, a terse and joyless Catholic. By contrast, the denizens of Summerisle are self-determined and sexually expressive. Howie's bullheadedness blinds him from the truth: pagan idolatry built the British Isles. His own credo, the institution he represents, are themselves perversions of a much deeper and older system of belief.

Ken Russell and Terry Gilliam are legendary figures in British film. But discussion around them is so often bashful, self-deprecating and tinged with shame. We have a national inability to face our own blood-drenched past.

In recent years, and especially with the foundation of Ben Wheatley's Rook Films, experimentation in narrative British cinema has been reinvigorated. Focus has returned from the tree to its gnarled roots. Sensuality and silliness has found its space again. A beleaguered public is rediscovering the escapism of film.

The latest from Rook, Peter Strickland's In Fabric, is set in Thames Valley. Anyone who lives there will attest to it being grey, corporate and consumerist. The entire region is, put simply, the admin department of the City of London. Not an obvious playground for Strickland's seductive, magical, and somewhat arch style.

But In Fabric rifles to the back of the wardrobe. It finds and lays bare the absurdity of shopping centres, dating, washing machine repair — you name it. The mundanities of life are cast into sharp relief, reframed, and given colour. Rather than bemoan our lot, In Fabric chuckles dryly to itself. The emotional intensity of Strickland's craft is still here. But it takes a backseat to what can only be described as 'John Waters does giallo'.

In an impressive balancing act, the film never descends into farce. Even a final-act setpiece involving a blasting siren is oddly mournful and horrific. Great performances across the board carry the film's more outrageous twists through. And a wonderful score by Cavern of Anti-Matter climaxes with such power and gusto you'll cover your ears and strain to listen at the same time.

By the way, it's about a dress that murders people.

See #InFabric In Cinemas & On Curzon Home Cinema Find out more at: https://www.curzon.com/in-fabric The latest from the unique imagination of Peter Strickland, IN FABRIC is a typically distinctive and haunting tale that blends Giallo-infused horror with absurdist dark humour, to ghostly effect.

In Fabric is available to rent and buy now.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Joker

Similarities conjoin the subjects of Todd Phillips' debut film (Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies) and his most recent, Joker. Allin was an agitative outcast who violated both himself and others. His striking image was no costume — rather his own sickly marrow surfaced and slathered over flesh. He engaged in suicidal ideations, with a long-term desire to commit suicide on stage. Allin's art and on-stage persona accrued a following of social lepers and self-described scumbags who, through him, lived a form of vicarious rebellion. 'He's doing something,' spoke a Hated talking head, 'a lot of people wish they had the fuckin' balls to do.'

A palpable fear stalked the U.S. release of Joker. The site of 2012's Aurora theatre shooting refused to screen the film, and security tightened in cinemas across the country. Copycats seemed poised to pounce. But in places where mass shootings are not treated like societal punctuation, tensions simmered far lower. Joker is an incendiary and ambiguous film. But, like Allin, it is too nihilistic and obscene to incite violent action. At worst, it permits space for unwholesome fantasies. But really, it's a pussycat — any fear-mongering you may have read is baseless and idiotic.

So where does discomfort surrounding Joker come from? Previous treatments tendered an amoral, symbolic force. Through Heath Ledger's cracked lips the Joker once said, 'I just do things.' Joaquin Phoenix's read, by contrast, is a character whose unsound means serve sane motivations. Audiences must reckon with their own immoral wants and uncomfortable complicity. But all Joker really does is provide the character with hitherto absent motivation and depth. It doesn't feed you the manifesto of a mass shooter.

Yes, Arthur Fleck is a beat-down, luckless dope transformed and made whole through violence. But Phillips' script muddies the specifics of Fleck's past, and refuses to pin his transgressions on one cause. All that's clear is that Fleck is selfish, embittered and apolitical. This is the story of one individual self-actualising. In buoyant scenes Arthur dances and applies makeup to embody his own anima. But when the film depicts his other triumphs, it is in an ironic and uncomfortable mode.

Arthur’s journey is, underneath it all, tragic. He attributes his sorry lot to the wrong victims. He acts in rash confusion and rage. And he misidentifies short-term bursts of bloody gratification as his life's zenith. The film's coda suggests a return to violence — all he has divined is how to scratch an itch that will now forever return.

Where Joker stumbles is in its integration of existing comic-book lore. In Arthur's world, Batman seems a preposterous concept. The Wayne family's few scenes are without exception jarring, and occupy time which would have better served Robert De Niro's interesting-but-underwritten Murray Franklin. It's small-fry, though, for a film which is subtler, smarter and more artful than many would have you believe.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe