Wheatley's "In the Earth" is a trippy, deeply weird freakout

In the Earth (2021)

Writer-director-editor Ben Wheatley (2020’s “Rebecca”) never makes the same movie twice. An auteur to be sure, he is also an acquired taste (see 2013’s aggressively experimental “A Field in England”). With the micro-budget folk -and-survival horror movie "In the Earth," anyone new to his filmmaking sensibilities is unlikely to be converted to the Wheatley cult. While the unpredictably disturbing gear-switcher “Kill List” and darkly delightful road romance “Sightseers” still remain the director’s best work, his latest nevertheless illustrates his daring and weirdness found in this story about madness linked to the woodsy open air where “people get a bit funny.” Blur weird science and the mythos of Mother Nature—and maybe muddle “The Blair Witch Project,” “Wolf Creek,” “Annihilation,” and “Midsommar”—and you have the nativity of “In the Earth.” 

In the near future during a global pandemic—a backdrop that’s more of a means to an end than having much bearing on the narrative course—Dr. Martin Lowery (Joel Fry) ventures into the forest for a quarantine check (and a nasal swab test) after a four-month lockdown in isolation. He plans a two-day hike to find his unreachable colleague, Dr. Olivia Wendle (Hayley Squires), with whom he’s shared an unspoken bond throughout their fungal research. Martin, not the outdoorsy type, has a guide in park ranger Alma (Ellora Torchia), and off they go. After camping out and being attacked at night in their tents, their first morning begins with them realizing their boots have been stolen, and Martin has a seriously injured foot that will only get worse. Alma feels someone is watching them, and she would be right. It’s a rugged wilderness man named Zach (Reece Shearsmith), who shows them kindness and hospitality. In actuality, Zach is a madman living off the grid, holding Martin and Alma hostage for an ancient ritual. Once the hikers finally reach a test site in the forest, it seems Olivia is convinced that nature, particularly trees, can talk amongst itself, and to her.

Contextualized in the times we have been living (and shot during the UK lockdown), “In the Earth” initially feels immediate and identifiable in that the characters have all just come out of pandemic-fueled isolation. In an early moment that forebodes danger, there’s a conversation between Martin and Alma talking about the local folktale of Parnag Fegg, the spirit of the woods, which was told to kids to keep them from wandering off. Once Martin and Alma have set foot on their own journey and encounter Zach, the film becomes slightly more eldritch, even being set on Earth, and less easy to understand. Even Olivia tells the two protagonists to not “make any logical sense out of it,” which is just as well for the viewer when Wheatley might get lost a bit in his own woo-woo pretension. Wheatley is best when cranking up the squeamish tension with false starts and close calls, and he keeps this up until we have to just laugh for release. For instance, when Zack has drugged Martin and Alma with a floral tea of his own concoction and holds them captive, he also rationalizes that Martin’s foot—at least a couple of toes—must be amputated with his sharpened ax, of course. Martin’s poor foot goes through so much, even after Zach tries his hand at performing surgery. 

When “In the Earth” sticks to apocalyptic insanity and body-horror grisliness and lays off the hallucinogens, it’s the most effective. Wheatley paints the woods with such a pall of dread—and the shot of a silhouetted Zach wielding an ax is bound to already become iconic—that it proves how much one can maximize with modest means and limitations during a real-life pandemic. Clint Mansell’s ominous synth score, as well as the pulsating sound design by Martin Pavey and sound mixing by Rob Entwistle, does some heavy lifting, too, in crafting an ethereal woodland soundscape. There’s also a key use of stroboscopic lighting that jars and rattles like a nightmarish EDM show, daring viewers to close their eyes. This is mostly a three-hander for most of its run time, but the film never grows one-note or routine. Reece Shearsmith even brings mordant humor to Zach’s menace without making him a generically over-the-top paranoid madman type, and Hayley Squires brings false security to the otherwise wild-card Olivia. Ultimately more impenetrable than haunting in what it wants to say about coexistence with Terra Mater, “In the Earth” still unsettles and then confounds as a trippy, deeply weird freakout.

Grade: B -

NEON released “In the Earth” (100 min.) in theaters on April 16, 2021.