Plan B Forum

What is a psychedelic historical drama, one might ask? Well, based on A Field In England, its as if an art student dropped acid, wrote a half baked and incomprehensible story about three deserters from the English Civil War who are forced to search and dig for buried treasure in a field- but with Deep Purple cast in the lead roles. There is much herky jerky camera work and a positively grating nu-folk score to go along with the graphic depictions of heads and limbs being blown off and men crapping in a field and displaying their private parts. All very original with some stunning visual poetry, but the intended metaphorical hell was more easily experienced in the watching of this movie rather than being inherent in the storyline itself.

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wrote that A Field in England was a "grisly and visceral" film that was "exposed to the elements, shivering with fever and discomfort". Bradshaw said that Wheatley has "cleverly alighted on the one period that suits his stripped-down visuals and subversive instincts perfectly".[15] Jonathan Romney of The Independent wrote that the film was Wheatley's "most unclassifiable yet, blending historical drama, 1960s psychedelia and formal experimentation". He said, "Flawed as it is, A Field in England is some achievement, drumming up an earthly inferno out of next to nothing—dirt and wind, a patch of land, some blokes with scraggy beards. The result, in a minor-key fashion, is a blast—Apocalypse Now among the hedgerows."[16]

Stephen Dalton, reviewing for The Hollywood Reporter, said, "A strikingly original historical thriller spiced with occult mysticism and mind-warping hallucinations, British director Ben Wheatley's fourth feature has all the midnight-movie intensity of a future cult classic." Dalton noted flaws in the film but said that beside them, A Field in England is a rich, strange, hauntingly intense work from a highly original writer-director team."[1] Peter Debruge of Variety called A Field in England "a defiantly unclassifiable cross-genre experiment... that simultaneously reinvents and regurgitates low-budget British cinema as it goes". Debruge said of the director's approach, "Clearly, Wheatley is bored with the paint-by-numbers approach of his horror contemporaries, but has swung so far in the opposite direction here, the result feels almost amateurishly avant garde at times, guilty of the sort of indulgences one barely tolerates in student films."[17]

a half baked and incomprehensible story about three deserters from the English Civil War who are forced to search and dig for buried treasure in a field- but with Deep Purple cast in the lead roles. There is much herky jerky camera work and a positively grating nu-folk score to go along with the graphic depictions of heads and limbs being blown off and men crapping in a field and displaying their private parts.