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.

Requiem (2018)

Warning: I won’t spell things out completely, but there are certainly some spoilers towards the nature of the series and its ending in here!

Things are going swell for cellist Matilda (Lydia Wilson) and her musical partner – who is more of a further appearing kind of guy in their promo materials – Hal (Joel Fry). They seem to be hitting the big time as much as a chamber music duo can today, with a big London show coming up and important American tour dates in their future.

However, directly before the start of said big show, Lydia witnesses her mother Janice (Joanna Scanlan) committing suicide by cutting her own throat right in front of her. There weren’t any warning signs at all, and Matilda is very distraught. Sadness and pain mixes with confusion when she finds a shoebox on her mother’s bed. It is full of photos – apparently shot stalker-style – of people Matilda doesn’t know, newspaper clips and a videotape with TV news features about the disappearance of a small girl named Carys in a Welsh village twenty years ago. Thinking about what these things mean is like an itch she can’t stop scratching for Matilda, so she and Hal make their way to Wales, where their questions open up old wounds and suggest increasingly more occult explanations for what has happened to the girl and what all of this has to do with Matilda.

This six part BBC/Netflix series is a mix of mystery and supernatural tale, written in most part by its creator Kris Mrksa and directed by Mahalia Belo, both with TV experience – Mrksa a lot of it - but with not much else coming up on IMDB. It’s a genuinely excellent mixture, using the parallels between modern mystery and crime tales about cold cases and what at first seems to be a ghost story, but ending up in a somewhat different direction than you’d at first expect, the ghost story rather elegantly escalating into an occult conspiracy story.

The writing is not above using clichés, but this is more the case of the piece using well-worn tropes because they fit its needs, not because it can’t come up with something better. Even the crime standard of the lost child isn’t the easy emotional in for the audience it sometimes tends to be but an intrinsic part of this tale, for the story is indeed about it instead of using it as an easy way to grab the viewer. The mystery is well enough constructed that even once I had figured out the shape of the story relatively early on (subjective thousand years of genre cinema and literature consumption will do that to you), it was a pleasure to follow the series into the details, the obvious ones and the less so. The characters are interesting throughout, usually starting from a point a viewer will have a handle of as a cliché, but eventually showing more complexity and facets that turn them into people. Very often, the characters feel more like they are the people on whom the clichés were based, rather than clichés.

I did find myself somewhat exasperated by Matilda’s approach to, well, anything, (while still rooting for her) in part because of the socially anxious person’s discomfort at someone being quite this direct and immune to what strangers might think of her, but also because Requiem makes very believable how someone genuinely hurt by her past and recent events might end up bursting through human niceties, proprieties and other people’s lives in a way that can only lead to something very bad for everyone involved. In fact, I wouldn’t see things ending much better for our protagonist if there were nothing supernatural involved here at all. At the same time, the way Wilson portrays her, she never becomes a caricature, but a pained and sometimes frustrating human being that really deserves better.

Speaking of the supernatural, one of the most pleasant surprises for me was the actual nature of the beings involved, the clever way the show portrays and uses them, basing them on a certain historical magician and his beliefs and practices, without either getting too much into the minutiae of occult practices nor ending up with people in robes muttering about Satan. Obviously, used and portrayed as present but mysterious and not truly understandable but us humans, these beings are rather disturbing not just because they are involved in spookiness, but because of the ideas about the cosmos they represent.

Belo’s direction is generally of the slick, contemporary TV style that may not have as much money to work with as a blockbuster, but that never feels cheap and suggests not the classic picture of some work-for-hire hack quickly shooting away at a script she doesn’t care about. The direction is as composed and thought through as you’d wish from every director worth your time as a viewer.

Some of the horror sequences will not be exactly new to the discerning viewer of this sort of thing, but Belo’s handling of Matilda’s shifting states of consciousness, and the intersection between the more visible horror effects and those that are just in her mind or might just be in other characters’ minds is flawless, and often wonderfully creepy without ever only wanting to creep you out. However, this is not the kind of tale that cops out on the supernatural in the end. As a matter of fact, the ending, while elegantly not showing a lot things, is consequent and rather brutal in this regard, while also keeping with what the series has set up about its supernatural world before.


So, Requiem is a rather lovely piece of work.