Every time I watch it, I get to a point—normally within the first ten minutes—where I wonder how is it possible that I liked it so much the last I saw it. With the same punctuality, an indefinite stretch further into the film, I always find myself completely enthralled by it.
However paced by a few attractive lines and scraps of dialogue—such as ‘You cannot escape the field, Whitehead! / Then I shall become it! 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 and bury it in the stomach of this place!’—A Field in England doesn’t carry any particularly profound message and doesn’t indulge in pretentious ostentations of auteurism. One of the most intriguing collaborations between Amy Jump and Ben Wheatley to date, it is instead a candid act of cinema whose uneducated instincts happen to feed the most genuine sense of experimentation.
Whereas the prologue is occasionally spoiled by some awkward comedy attempts—like a soldier awakening from apparent death saying, ‘Did someone mention ale?’—the film puts soon itself together replacing the facetious with the witty and the ironic. Even preposterous moments like a character materialising from a post that has been pulled out of the ground through a sort of asymmetric tug of war, seems to find their place in the surreal context.
The entire psychedelic sequence is an intoxicating, if raw, work of visual bravura that relates in my mind to the most clever advice I have ever heard giving. Speaking about the fear of not doing the right thing—or at least not right in the eyes of someone who might have the power to judge it so—Paul Thomas Anderson once said, ‘Just don’t give a fuck, that’s kind of the best thing to do.’ Which is right the spirit A Field in England seems to be fuelled with. Bizarre, flawed, brazen, inspiring.
