In the Earth (2021)

directed by Ben Wheatley

UK

106 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I hesitate to even mention that this film is set during the current pandemic, because I don't want it to get pigeonholed as a "pandemic movie" when it's so much more than that. It is, however, the first movie I've seen thus far that is set in the here and now not as a deliberate theme but just as a fact of the film's reality. I think what Ben Wheatley does by never explicitly mentioning the name of the virus or anything that could identify this as being our current reality is very clever and sets In the Earth up to be something that continues to feel fresh even long after we're out of this mess. The presence of heightened safety measures and mentions of deaths and lockdowns that are not attributed to anything specific gives the whole film a surreal, not-quite-right atmosphere that could be read as meaning anything, not necessarily what we're going through in real life.

This was by far my most anticipated film of the year and I have to say that it did not disappoint. Wheatley at times seems to be moving further away from the psychedelia of A Field in England and towards more traditional narrative films (we won't talk about Rebecca, but... it exists), but In the Earth is a (chemical) marriage of the two. It begins, as I said, grounded in a recognizable reality, but as it goes on, it strays further and further into something revelatory and strange, a telluric nightmare. I was preparing myself to be a little let down if the film had stayed where it was once the main characters meet who you think is going to be the primary antagonist, because the introduction of some nutcase who espoused what seemed to me to be the themes of the film itself confuses things for me: Is this a movie about nature as persona and how to communicate with that persona, or is this a movie about a crazy guy who thinks he can communicate with nature as persona? But not pigeonholing may be the biggest lesson to take away from this, because like the way Kill List was so boring until its incredibly chaotic last act that it still remains wildly divisive, there is a pervasive feeling throughout this whole film that it's withholding something from you and snickering behind your back at the knowledge it keeps close to its vest.

A beautiful film visually as well as fascinating conceptually, the use of strong single-color lighting to backdrop many scenes in the forest makes this stand out (I mean that literally as well as a figure of speech) from other movies that use a forest as their setting. I was struck by how unnatural the signs of human habitation within the forest looked, the way they were shot- the sun shining through Zach's tent and giving everything a bright red glow, the strobing of Dr. Olivia's experimental light-and-sound methods- but how it still really felt like I was there inside it. This is another shortfall I've noticed in in-the-woods movies: watching a forest on film usually does little to nothing to convey its expansiveness; that can only be experienced standing in the middle of it. But I felt that expansiveness when I was watching In the Earth. The sense of the forest is palpable, it's like physically being there on a wet and muggy and chilly night, clothes soaked through. Excellent cinematography that combines the natural and constructed in ways that are not only good to look at but also relevant to the film's message.

During the scene where Alma (played very, very well by Ellora Torchia as if she hadn't already had a bad enough time with nature in Midsommar) experiences the full brunt of the forest's consciousness, I kept thinking of a specific line from the last episode of True Detective's first season that has stuck with me over the years since I watched the show. "You're in Carcosa now", said to the main character not to indicate a physical passage but a crossing into a mental state. Carcosa as synonym for trouble, you're in trouble now, now you're somewhere that you can't come back from. I think the title of this film fits perfectly into what that line represents. You're in the Earth now. No coming back.

Ben Wheatley really does not do traditional horror, though he has made many films that I would call horror, and this is another example of that. This movie breaks down the elements of folk horror into something more avant-garde, something that isn't guided by tropes so much as it is by an overall atmosphere. But if you're going into this expecting something classically creepy, you're probably looking in the wrong place. The horror of this comes from the unknown and unknowable, and again I am going to borrow a line, this time from the film adaptation of Annihilation and possibly the only unique and interesting thing that film had to contribute: It's not like us. It's un-like us. That's what the mind at the center of In the Earth is: unlike us. The full horror- if you can even call it horror, but what Alma experiences certainly looked pretty horrific to an outsider- is in the enmeshment of a mind entirely foreign to human senses with our own minds. I think that this could do with multiple watches before I feel like I've gotten all of it.