In the Earth

I've now seen three movies by Ben Wheatley, and I've determined that his movies all can have the adjective "insufferable" applied to them. The first was A Field In England, an insufferably obtuse bit of wannabe folk horror nonsense that defiantly refused to have a narrative. It felt like the work of a film student who already introduces himself as an artiste. The second was his insufferably boring and fatally misguided remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca. It was a passionless movie, both in artistic drive and the chemistry of its leads, in no small part due to the casting of the human black hole of charisma that is Armie Hammer as Max DeWinter. Remaking classic Hitchcock should be a war crime. Doing so with all the passion one might have approaching colonoscopy prep should be grounds for deportation from the planet. Which brings us to In The Earth, an insufferably pretentious attempt to make a horror movie about the anxieties of living through the COVID pandemic. Whatever high-minded attempt at a story Wheatley -- who directed and wrote this -- is suffocated at birth by the movie's overselling of everything it does, both in importance and profundity. The movie's story, if it can be accused of having more than the barest of sketches of a concept of an idea of a story, is that, during a pandemic, a forest ranger leads a scientist to find another scientist in a forest, who is ostensibly working on a cure. The movie wants you to think there is something deeply sinister and supernatural is up in the forest. It also wants you to think certain people are dangerous and others aren't. The problem is that the script is shoddily written, it's like knowing someone's tell when they lie, but they don't know you know. Every plot development this movie can muster up, it tries to tell you it won't happen, and then it does, and it gets to the point where you just don't care anymore, because it feels like the movie is too stupid to know it's betraying itself. Of the four principal actors, two of them play it way too obvious to be trustworthy, and a third is too wide-eyed and naive to be believable, leaving only Ellora Torchia, who plays the forest ranger Alma, as anyone to give a damn about. I rooted for her. I wanted her to survive. I couldn't give a rat's ass about the rest. The movie is not scary or suspenseful, even though it keeps trying to build the atmosphere for it. Ben thinks shots of the wind blowing through grass captured at ground level have some deep, profound meaning, and it doesn't. He thinks injecting the movie with patter about the humans and nature all being one big system that needs to speak together and live in harmony is some grand statement that speaks to our post-pandemic anxieties and fears. Ben, come here, lemme tell ya something; the hippies were slinging that in the 60's, trying to use good vibes and love to make the Pentagon lift up and float away. It didn't work then, and trying to use it to address all the psychological damage that came out of lockdowns and everything else 2020 had to offer is not only insipid and foolish, it's also mawkish and gross. This is not some grand statement on the human condition, and you are not some oracle, Ben. You made a movie with a premise thinner than a Fredericks Of Hollywood negligee, and then you dared to cheap out of your own narrative with a barrage of psychedelic imagery because you couldn't cook up an ending. Stop inflicting the world with your dollar store Stanley Kubrick impression. This movie is insufferable, naval-gazing garbage. If I ever see Ben Wheatley's name on a movie again, I will turn and run. I gave him more chances than he deserved. If it weren't for Ellora Torchia being excellent, this movie would get a half star, and it wouldn't deserve that. She and she alone saves this movie from an even more wrathful review.