Meg 2: The Trench (2023)

Some years after the first Meg. Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham), still a total badass (because he’s played by Jason Statham), is now working for Jiuming Zhang (Jing Wu, also a total badass, but more on that in a second), the brother of the last film’s tragic (cough) shark victims. Apart from being a badass underwater explorer, Jonas is also a bit of an eco warrior now and takes good care of his daughter Meiying (Sophia Cai). Because this is a very Chinese co-produced movie, Jiuming is just as great at everything he does as Jonas, so if a Gary Stu double team isn’t part of your movie dreams, you’d probably best hide now.

Their combined perfection will come in handy when an exploration of the trench where the megalodons come from goes badly awry, and the team has to fight their way back to the surface not just through megalodons but also a couple of other critters. And yes, of course, Meiying smuggled herself on the expedition, do you even need to ask? Also involved are a traitor in our heroes’ midst, an evil American corporation of evil (in contrast to the angelic Chinese one the good guys are working for, of course) who hires the least competent mercenaries on the market – probably to save a buck – and eventually a place known as Fun Island. Which is more fun with added monsters.

Given that even the directors of Marvel blockbusters are allowed to put some stylistic marks on their films, you’d think that Meg 2 would leave some space for the things its director Ben Wheatley is known for and good at. No such luck here, alas – there’s really not a single shot in the movie that would suggest Wheatley, or really anyone with a personality behind the camera.

If one can cope with that, and treats The Meg 2 as the cartoonish shark action movie with way too much unfunny humour it is meant to be, there is a lot of fun to be had here. While the script is a mix of painfully unsubtle Chinese propagandist subtext, more clichés than you can throw a landshark at, plotting that’s as far from being dramatically effective as can be, and further dragged down into absurdity by having to include not just the usual one but two specimen of men who are always right and can do anything, it is difficult to fault a film that’s so hell-bent on shoving in whatever its writers think is fun. So there’s the expected megalodons, but also a horde of other critters, underwater action, a few second of claustrophobia, thriller-type traitors, a third act that just jumps to a completely different place as well as into a different shark movie sub-genre – whatever shark movie you’d like to watch, there are couple of scenes of it in here. None of which combined makes much sense as a story, or works as a proper narrative, but is very enjoyable as a series of colourful, noisy flashes in front of one’s face. If this makes a viewer feel like a cat following a laser pointer, well, there are worse fates in life.

In the Earth (2021)

Warning: there are structural spoilers coming your way!

During a global pandemic outbreak, biologist Martin Lowery (Joel Fry) comes to a scientific outpost bordering a humungous arboreal forest. He is tasked with helping with the sample work of Dr Olivia Wendle (Hayley Squires). Though that’s not the only – or central – reason he has come, for, as we will eventually learn, he once had a relationship with Wendle, and was still exchanging regular letters with her. Letters that some day just stopped. Which, as it turns out, is not the only thing that has stopped in the last six months or so: Wendle hasn’t had any contact with her colleagues at the border of the forest either, except for dropping off samples in collection boxes in the woods, and has spent the time smack dab in the middle of the forest in her own camp.

That’s where Martin is bound now, accompanied by park ranger Alma (Ellora Torchia). For city guy Martin, having to travel two days through the forest would be bad enough, but on their first night, someone attacks them, smashes their radio and steals their shoes. Fortunately, they soon meet Zach (Reece Shearsmith), who apparently lives in the woods as a hermit. He seems helpful enough with food, drink and shoes, but you know how these things can go.

And that’s really not at all everything Ben Wheatley’s COVID lockdown-production has to offer. In fact, for much of its running time, In the Earth shifts and transforms between or through different horror or weird subgenres, until it eventually arrives at looking at folk horror through a somewhat Nigel Kneale-ish lens.

At first, all this shifting and not quite committing to sub-genres and their respective tropes makes the movie somewhat hard to grasp. In fact, I did initially get the impression of a film not quite willing to commit to anything and mostly interested in going through a kind of scrap book of Wheatley’s pop cultural interests and obsessions. Once the film arrived in its final stage, all that shifting through different genres actually began to make sense as absolutely necessary part of the film’s structure, for this is one of those folk horror movies that really aims to funnel its audience through the concrete stages of the enacted ritual together with the characters, where everything we see is indeed part of a calculated ritual. Though, unlike in Wheatley’s other great folk horror film Kill List, this ritual is not necessarily one enacted through and by human agency, even when the human agents seem to think that it is. Audience and characters alike are in the hands of something bigger and more difficult to understand, and something most certainly not human. Which, in the case of this film doesn’t necessarily mean it to be a destructive or malevolent power – just one whose interests may be very different from our human ones.

Tellingly enough, the genre shifts here are always moving away from the more human centric interests of survival horror and torture porn towards the weird and the abstract, through the sort of psychedelic trip footage Wheatley so obviously loves until we arrive at an evocation of the isolation and strangeness of nature and the dangers of trying to explain it on human terms. Particularly the second half of the film is full of brilliant shots, making use of very simple visual techniques (strobe lights, limited lighting, and so on), a great Clint Mansell soundtrack and pretty fantastic old school British science fiction sound design, all in service of emphasising how strange the natural world and what might be behind/below/in it actually are.

All of which is of course like catnip to me, and pretty much makes this my favourite Wheatley movie since Kill List – and most of his films in between were great.

Free Fire (2016)

It’s the late 70s. An arms deal between a group of IRA members (Cillian Murphy, Michael Smiley and others) and a South African arms dealer (Sharlto Copley, playing the part of the most horrifyingly annoying man alive) and his entourage, finagled by an American middle woman (Brie Larson) who really doesn’t have much fun with being a woman in late 70s macho land, goes very wrong indeed. Some, let’s call them “personal issues”, between some of the foot soldiers on both sides escalate into a drawn-out shoot-out and stand-off in a warehouse, and soon, very many characters are bleeding, shooting and cursing. Not always in this order, and quite a bit of dying is involved too..

Free Fire is the film that really decides it for me: Ben Wheatley (and his regular writing and editing partner Amy Jump) is a director that’ll stay with me for the next few decades, making one film that isn’t like the one he made before or the ones before that yet still retains a personal handwriting every year and keeping me happy with it, sometimes making a perfect movie like Kill List, sometimes an interesting effort, sometimes more, sometimes less.

For my tastes (and the Internet informs me not everyone shares my enthusiasm), Free Fire is nearly as good as Kill List, and is certainly the crowning achievement in the warehouse action comedy genre. Of course, if you’ve read that Free Fire is supposed to consist exclusively out of one long shoot-out, you might be disappointed by a film whose characters only start shooting at each other 25 minutes or so in, and which isn’t at all interested in the sort of non-stop, slow-motion gun fu you might expect on first hearing about it. Technically, there’s a one-hour gun battle here, but in practice, most of the characters are wounded more or less heavily early on, so instead of the expected extreme spectacle, this is actually a character piece that delights in having a fantastic cast (there are also Sam Riley, Armie Hammer, Enzo Cilenti, Babou Ceesay and other fine thespians involved) of actual actors playing around with their characters, bickering, cursing, making jokes, and bleeding.

There is still quite a bit of action going around here, though, it’s just that Wheatley makes his job purposefully difficult by staging action scenes between characters who are mostly only able to crawl, slither and sometime hop around for much of the film. That doesn’t just add a sense of the absurd (there’s always a bit of Beckett in a Wheatley film) to the film but also provides the director with the opportunity to come up with action set pieces that aren’t quite like the ones you’ll find in a John Wick movie, and which turn out pretty damn great to my eyes.


As does the temporal and local colour (warning to the overly sensitive: there’s a degree of racism and sexism involved but it is one of the characters and not of the film), the acting (obviously), the photography, the texture of the language and the structure of the editing. Given these standards, that the film we get isn’t quite the film most of us probably expect going in isn’t a bad thing to me. Free Fire, like all of Wheatley’s movies until now, is very much doing its own thing, not too interested in being the film an audience expects rather than the one it should and wants to be.

In short: Sightseers (2012)

When even a film as great as Ben Wheatley's last one, the brilliant Kill List, turns out to be somewhat divisive, I shudder to think what people will say about Sightseers, a black comedy of the most peculiar type.

Chris (Steve Oram) and Tina (Alice Lowe) go on a sightseeing trip through the English countryside (filmed in a subtly beautiful way). that trip also becomes a minor killing spree. Chris and Alice are a very British skewed mirror image of the serial killer couples haunting the imagination of the American mid-west, with all the sexiness (though not the sex) and the "youth in rebellion" replaced by the the hang-ups of beginning middle age, the quotidian grotesque, and the small-mindedness that so easily turns mean.

The film's humour is peculiar enough to take getting used to, seeing as it often works by just giving the slightly surreal parts of daily life (or the real world, if you want) a push towards the even more surreal, very much in the spirit that brought us other peculiar British things of the macabre yet (sometimes) funny disposition. It's also the same general spirit that brought us hauntology, the music of the Ghost Box label and Scarfolk, a spirit I think of whenever I - as a non-Brit - hear the word "British". I'm sorry, the Queen, but this is exactly what I want from your country. Just blame Rialto's Edgar Wallace movies and The Wicker Man.

Stylistically, this one's just as successful as Kill List was, with Wheatley effortlessly going from the petit bourgeois humour to hallucinatory dream sequences to sudden violence and back again as if it were no big thing, turning the film as dream-like as the best European horror movies, even though the plot is nothing like your typical European horror movie. Unfortunately, this description is the best I can come up with for Sightseers attraction, for it is one of these rather infuriating films I fall in love with during their first ten minutes, yet really can't ramble on about as much and as detailed as I would like to. Just treat this write-up as a placeholder for something better and a somewhat helpless attempt at a recommendation, while I insert a final, random shout-out for Sightseers' soundtrack.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,in short,horror,comedy,ben wheatley,alice lowe,steve oram

Kill List (2011)

Warning: structural spoilers ahoy.

Eight months after a job went wrong and left professional killer Jay (Neil Maskell) a depressed wreck (though it's not hard to suspect he already was a total mess before that event), money has finally run out. The marriage to his wife Shel (MyAnna Buring) - with whom he also has a child (Harry Simpson) - is going down the drain too, for Shel can't cope with Jay's breakdown nor the lack of money, nor Jay's pretending nothing at all to be wrong too well. So it comes as something of a relief to her when Jay's old partner Gal (Michael Smiley) and his new girlfriend Fiona (Emma Fryer) come to dinner and Gal offers Jay to partner up for a lucrative job.

It's a job in the UK, which won't keep Jay too long away from home, there's only a kill list of three and pretty big money in it, so the offer looks like a nice step back into the working life, such as it is.

Once the pair of killers gets the job started, their usual routine is broken by weird little occurrences that hint at something more complex, and much more terrible, than just bad people killing even worse ones. Why, for example, do the victims thank Jay? Sooner or later, the killers and the audience will find out. Not surprisingly, not everyone will like what he finds.

Despite having read some very positive reviews, I went into Ben Wheatley's Kill List with a certain degree of trepidation. Films built on a third act twist often tend to annoy me, and a third act twist whose existence I already know about is generally even less effective. However, Kill List isn't at all constructed like one of those twist-based films I expected. In fact, the characters' final doom is preordained nearly from the first shot, with clear moments of foreshadowing only the least attentive (like the IMDB commenters who seem to think the film "changes genres" about two thirds in) won't recognize as such. For my eyes, Kill List is constructed with a viewer who does by and large understand what's going on in mind. Wheatley's film tries and (at least in my case) very much succeeds at building a feeling of dread based on its audience's expectation of its story's outcome for its characters, building a mood of an inevitable doom that is disquieting and unnerving, and just a little bit cruel.

Speaking of cruelty, it is as surprising as it is impressive how nasty the film actually dares to get without feeling the need to be impressed by its own naughtiness, which is the thing (well, that and the horrible scripts) that, for example, ruined the Human Centipede films for me. There's nothing that makes a film less disturbing than when it shouts "Look how disturbing I am!" at you, so I'm glad Wheatley's film doesn't step into that trap.

Stylistically, Kill List is a clear successor of the UK's "social realism" school of filmmaking, with a love for mumbled dialogue (in part improvised, going by the credits) and shots that look much less artlessly constructed than they actually are. Usually, this style isn't my cup of tea at all, but in Kill List's case, the friction between the type of story a film shot in this style is normally allowed to tell and the story it actually is telling is just one element more that makes the film so brilliant at achieving its unnerving effect.

And unnerving Kill List truly turned out to be for me. Obviously, I'm someone who watches a lot of horror movies, but I'm generally only really disturbed or emotionally bothered by a handful of films per year. Kill List clearly belongs to this special group of films, the sort of movie that lingers in my mind, not exactly as something I'm afraid of, but as something I know I will carry with me for quite some time. In truth, I'm not quite sure I'll sleep all that well tonight - a (perhaps dubious) compliment for Wheatley's film. Clearly, this doesn't mean the film will have that kind of effect on everyone, for we all have different things bound to disturb our dreams; it is, however, not an achievement that should ever go unmentioned.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,horror,ben wheatley,neil maskell,myanna buring,michael smiley,emma fryer