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“In the Earth” is a film that should be seen at a late hour. Intense, brutal, pretentious and frequently stirring, it is a film to behold. It is memorable in every aspect, even though some sections are rushed and the ending is a mess, because it is memorable throughout. This low-budget thriller, which takes place primarily in gloomy fairy-tale woodlands where representatives of science are terrorized by forces both human and uncanny, has the swagger of a larger production despite being shot on a shoestring budget. Ben Wheatley’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “The Shining” are a blend of science fiction, horror, and the supernatural, with nods to classic films such as Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “The Shining” as inspiration. A grungy, icky horror film from the 1970s appears to be the unifying inspiration, especially if it is the kind that serves as an endurance test, such as “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” “The Last House on the Left,” and “Halloween,” that leaves viewers feeling either exhilarated or brutalized, depending on their tolerance for cinematic extremism.
During a pandemic, Dr. Martin Lowery (Joel Fry), who has been isolated and longs for human contact, ventures into the woods with park ranger Alma (Ellora Torchia) in order to locate his colleague Dr. Olivia Wendle (Hayley Squires), with whom he has an unspoken, deep bond, but who has been unreachable since turning off her radio. Olivia’s research is intended to increase the efficiency of crop growth. She is convinced that all plant life is interconnected through a sort of psychic neural network and that it is capable of communicating with one another as well as with humans.
The mission is a complete failure from the start. Shortly after their arrival, Alma and Martin are brutalized and knocked unconscious in the woods; as the story progresses, Martin sustains a foot wound that will become worse and more disgusting as the story progresses. Many scenes are set as hostage dramas, with the duo falling prey to a creepy loner named Zach (Reece Shearsmith), who brutalizes them with the same aplomb as Leatherface’s family or Jigsaw from the “Saw” films. When the movie finally introduces Olivia into the story, after a protracted, almost Kurtz-like buildup, she turns out to be just as unsettling as Zach was before her introduction. You can tell by Squires’ unnerving line delivery and facial expressions (she manages to be both droll and menacing at the same time) that Olivia is just as insane as she is in her own way.
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Without going into specifics, let’s call this a wilderness survival drama with elements of slasher and body horror cinema, as well as undercurrents of pre-Christian mythology and ooga-booga bedtime stories, without giving anything away. As an audience engagement insurance policy, the film’s first act plays out like a European arthouse cinema brainteaser that aims to ponder humanity’s fate in an age of extinction-level threats (the majority of which are our own collective fault), but which makes sure to throw ultra-violence and gnomic mysticism into the mix as well. When Wheatley saw Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker,” one of the great lost-in-the-magic woods films, as well as a towering work of philosophy and ethics, he must have thought to himself, “This film would be even better if it had an actual stalker in it.” Because of this, the fragility of flesh takes center stage, and we are treated to numerous closeups of bleeding, torn, and mangled body parts. A preoccupation with openings, orifices, and eye-like shapes pervades the visuals, many of which are discovered in woodland panoramas and others which are created within one’s own body’s landscape.
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We’re also informed right away that Olivia’s research focuses on the forest’s unusually fertile soil, so we prepare ourselves for the possibility that we’ll be dealing with invasive fungus activity (the hero even tells us that he had ringworm recently). This promise is fulfilled by the film, albeit not in the manner that you might expect. According to one of the characters, high technology is indistinguishable from magic to members of primitive civilizations, which is a well-known observation in science fiction.
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As the story progresses, “In the Earth” weaves together contemporary scientific research and theory with ancient rituals designed to communicate with (and appease) Parnag Fegg, an ancient eldritch force who may have summoned all of humanity to the woods in the first place. The script’s exposition-heavy lore, which postulates that science will eventually find a way to perfect the approximations of scripture, ritual, and spell-casting, has a tinge of John Carpenter’s “Prince of Darkness” about it.
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All of this information is connected only in passing or in a hazy manner. However, there are times when it appears as though Wheatley is fudging things, like a magician who asks “Is this your card?” and then removes it just quickly enough that you aren’t sure you aren’t looking at the same card twice. In the film’s most intense scenes, dazzling flash-cuts, disorienting jump cuts, and incessant strobe effects heighten the sense of dread and confusion even further. All of the screaming and crying and pain would be unbearable if Wheatley didn’t inject his trademark mordant wit into the proceedings. “It’s like a horror movie,” he says. He’s constantly setting up scenes in which you know exactly what horrible thing is going to happen to one of the characters, and then making you wait for it, and wait for it, through false starts, digressions, and clumsy mistakes that necessitate a re-write to fix the problem. And when it finally happens, it’s a sight to behold.
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However, where the film falls short as a substantive statement about this and that, it succeeds as a visceral exercise in audience tormentation. Throughout the film, Wheatley adheres to a horror film version of Chekhov’s principle, in which it is reasonable to assume that a rifle hanging on the wall of a set isn’t just there for atmosphere’s sake. Chekhov’s Hatchet, Chekhov’s Bow and Arrow, Chekhov’s Fungus, and Chekhov’s Guitar can all be found in this movie, among other things (used to lull characters to sleep through repetitive phrases that hit them like incantations). The film, like another low-budget 2021 film, “Lapsis,” makes use of nature’s splendors to give a small film an epic feel, and its skill at making you squirm suggests that, for all of its poker-faced wonderment over the machinations of the universe, Wheatley identifies most strongly with Zach, a grandiloquent sadist who has a captive audience where he wants them and revels in that fact. When I reached a certain point in the film, I stopped finding the ostentatious, close-up brutality amusing and instead started howling at it, and my experiences with some of Wheatley’s other films (particularly “Kill List” and “Free Fire”) have confirmed that not only is he fine with this sort of reaction, but he thrives on it.
A special mention should be made of cinematographer Nick Gillespie, whose widescreen images employ expressionist primary colors (particularly verdant green and purgatorial red) and make excellent use of fog and flame; and of composer Clint Mansell’s synthesized score, which is one of his best ever and so clearly indebted to director-composer John Carpenter’s scores for his own films that you can tell when you see the soft-spoken lunatic Zach trudging across fern-carpe
Select theaters are now showing the film.
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