A Field in England

I’ve avoided arthouse horror for some time now, because the genre just doesn’t appeal to me. I’m not gonna be one of those whiny jerks who says horror movies can’t have subtext or messages or themes to them. Dawn Of The Dead, American Psycho, The Stuff, Candyman, all these movies and far more contain strong messages and social commentary. Where arthouse movies lose my interest is in their nature of putting the art before everything else. It’s not enough to be scary and have a message; there has to be some level of veneer applied so that it doesn’t get lumped in with the Halloweens and the Screams of the world. These are Serious Films that so happen to have horrific themes, not horror movies. A Field In England is just that, except it doesn’t even try to have something to say (either at the subtext or text level). It’s far more concerned with creating a hallucinatory state for the audience, using weird filters and post-effects, indulging in trippy visuals and a broken narrative. Imagine if Get Out was all white people, and was directed by a second year art student. That’s A Field In England: a Serious Film that’s barely even horror adjacent, has no message, and is too busy drowning in artifice to have substance underneath. And it’s a shame, because if the ditched all the effects they found in Final Cut Pro and the stupid slow-mo and the shots of people standing still in weird poses for no reason and fleshed out the gaps, this could be a fascinating movie about superstition, greed and paranoia. The black and white really sells the potential horror here, and the characters are distinct and enjoyable. But instead of telling a story, they took every fourth page of the script, binned it, and said “let’s do something weird”, like have a guy hug a pole in a field, or four men pulling on a rope like tug-of-war, but on the other side is an unconscious man. It’s like if David Lynch directed The Witch. Too much style smothering the substance. Hooptober 2021 movie #22/24