Warning: there are structural spoilers coming your way!
During a global pandemic outbreak, biologist Martin Lowery (Joel Fry) comes to a scientific outpost bordering a humungous arboreal forest. He is tasked with helping with the sample work of Dr Olivia Wendle (Hayley Squires). Though that’s not the only – or central – reason he has come, for, as we will eventually learn, he once had a relationship with Wendle, and was still exchanging regular letters with her. Letters that some day just stopped. Which, as it turns out, is not the only thing that has stopped in the last six months or so: Wendle hasn’t had any contact with her colleagues at the border of the forest either, except for dropping off samples in collection boxes in the woods, and has spent the time smack dab in the middle of the forest in her own camp.
That’s where Martin is bound now, accompanied by park ranger Alma (Ellora Torchia). For city guy Martin, having to travel two days through the forest would be bad enough, but on their first night, someone attacks them, smashes their radio and steals their shoes. Fortunately, they soon meet Zach (Reece Shearsmith), who apparently lives in the woods as a hermit. He seems helpful enough with food, drink and shoes, but you know how these things can go.
And that’s really not at all everything Ben Wheatley’s COVID lockdown-production has to offer. In fact, for much of its running time, In the Earth shifts and transforms between or through different horror or weird subgenres, until it eventually arrives at looking at folk horror through a somewhat Nigel Kneale-ish lens.
At first, all this shifting and not quite committing to sub-genres and their respective tropes makes the movie somewhat hard to grasp. In fact, I did initially get the impression of a film not quite willing to commit to anything and mostly interested in going through a kind of scrap book of Wheatley’s pop cultural interests and obsessions. Once the film arrived in its final stage, all that shifting through different genres actually began to make sense as absolutely necessary part of the film’s structure, for this is one of those folk horror movies that really aims to funnel its audience through the concrete stages of the enacted ritual together with the characters, where everything we see is indeed part of a calculated ritual. Though, unlike in Wheatley’s other great folk horror film Kill List, this ritual is not necessarily one enacted through and by human agency, even when the human agents seem to think that it is. Audience and characters alike are in the hands of something bigger and more difficult to understand, and something most certainly not human. Which, in the case of this film doesn’t necessarily mean it to be a destructive or malevolent power – just one whose interests may be very different from our human ones.
Tellingly enough, the genre shifts here are always moving away from the more human centric interests of survival horror and torture porn towards the weird and the abstract, through the sort of psychedelic trip footage Wheatley so obviously loves until we arrive at an evocation of the isolation and strangeness of nature and the dangers of trying to explain it on human terms. Particularly the second half of the film is full of brilliant shots, making use of very simple visual techniques (strobe lights, limited lighting, and so on), a great Clint Mansell soundtrack and pretty fantastic old school British science fiction sound design, all in service of emphasising how strange the natural world and what might be behind/below/in it actually are.
All of which is of course like catnip to me, and pretty much makes this my favourite Wheatley movie since Kill List – and most of his films in between were great.