FREE FIRE - BFI LFF 2016 - Closing Night Gala - Day 12

Ben Wheatley's HIGH RISE may have been one of the most disappointing films of LFF2015 but his quick, scabrous shoot-em-up thriller FREE FIRE is a welcome return to form.  Moreover, after 12 days of melancholy art-house movies, it was the perfect palette cleanser and finale to this year's exceptionally good film festival. 

Short, sharp, cheap and nasty, the movie takes place almost entirely in a dingy warehouse some time in the 1970s.   Brie Larson plays the sole woman in the film and is presumably some kind of arms broker.  The buyers are two IRA terrorists played by Cillian Murphy and Wheatley alum Michael Smiley and the salesman are a South African (Sharlto Copley) and his enforcer (Armie Hammer).  Also present are associated side-kicks and half-wits played Sam Riley, Jack Reynor, Noah Taylor and Babou Ceesay.  Basically, this is a bunch of scoundrels, where trust and intelligence are both in short supply. So when a junkie driver brings up an old beef with another moron, shots get fired and pretty soon we're in a full on seventy minute shoot out.  

HIGH-RISE - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day Four

Yeah so, I love J G Ballard and High Rise is one of my favourite novels, and I really love Ben Wheatley's gonzo horror craziness, having done retrospective podcasts on his earlier films.  Tom Hiddleston is obviously not just a great actor but a nice guy.  So I was super excited about this new film.  The problem may have been high expectations. The problem may be that High Rise is a high concept novel and these can sometimes come across as flat on screen. But whatever the reason, HIGH-RISE was utterly underwhelming.

The movie, and indeed the novel on which it is pretty faithfully based, are set in 1970s England - another time of deep social inequality and financial disruption.  The high concept is that an architect has built a high-rise apartment block complete with all amenities - swimming pool, school, gym, supermarket - so that one need never leave.  And in classic English fashion, the social hierarchy is perfectly preserved inside - lower orders in floors 1 to 10, middle classes to floor 35 and upper classes above, with the architect as God in the penthouse.

A FIELD IN ENGLAND

Rounding out our Ben Wheatley retrospective, we come to his latest release, A FIELD IN ENGLAND.  This was remarkable for being the first British movie to be released simultaneously in the cinema, on TV and on demand.   I completely understand why Wheatley was in favour of this type of release. Going for a TV and OD release means that his film will be seen by far more people, and generate far more buzz, than with a conventional limited art-house cinema release followed at a distance by a DVD release. It's also another sign of the trend wherein TV and cinema have merged. In the old days, there was a snobbery about quality work being put out in cinemas, and TV being of lesser quality.  But now, with the HBO-isation of TV, we can see long-form drama of infinitely higher quality than shitty genre films, and budgets per minute that match anything Hollywood has to offer.  We're rapidly coming to a place where cinema, TV, ipads and phones are just media on which the content is delivered, and the hierarchy between them is being dissolved. To be sure, for any beautifully shot visual work, the bigger the screen the better, and there's always something to be said for the group experience, but modern life doesn't allow for the reverence of the movie theatre.  The common sense solution is simultaneous release.  To be sure, I'd urge you to watch visually arresting movies like A FIELD IN ENGLAND on a big screen. But if you don't live near an art-house cinema, that you can watch on its "opening weekend" is fantastic, even as the significance of that moniker in a Netflix mega-release world diminishes.

All of which is pre-amble to the review of the actual film, which is remarkable for its content as much as for the method of its release. 

The movie is set in the mid seventeenth century, during the English civil war - a period of history much under-filmed.  As the film opens, we meet a motley crew of deserters - Whitehead, an alchemist, fleeing his master, Trower, and Jacob and Friend, two deserters being marshalled by Cutler.   They amble about in a comedy of manners - the crude deserters making jokes about constipation and searching for an alehouse, while Whitehead asserts his delicate intellectual superiority.  The crew then come across the enigmatic O'Neill who, broadly speaking, asserts his authority, gets the group high on magic mushrooms, and forces them to dig for some unspecified, potentially magical, treasure. And then, in classic Ben Wheatley style, it all goes horribly, sickeningly wrong. 

For his fourth feature, Wheatley once again does something utterly different. After the domestic gangster flick that was DOWN TERRACE, and the cultish horror of KILL LIST, and the very darkly funny SIGHTSEERS, we get a period, black-and-white, cultish, trippy horror movie that defines all genre conventions.  A FIELD IN ENGLAND has elements of all of Wheatley's previous films.  We've got darkly funny comedy - jokes about constipation and nagging wives  - we've got a fascination with the mythic pagan magic of the English countryside - and we've got the seemingly banal slip into the bonkers and then finally the truly frightening.  And in terms of the formal direction, while this movie is in black and white, in period costume, and shot in a single film, A FIELD IN ENGLAND retains the elegant framing of DP Laurie Rose - arresting images that stay with us long after the movie is over - and ellipses that jolt us - in this movie, living tableaux. 

My view is that A FIELD IN ENGLAND is Wheatley most formally imaginative and daring film, and the visuals and sound mix are stunning.  There's a seen with a man being harnessed and driven like a horse that's as horrific as anything more graphic later in the film.  I love the casting of Reece Sheersmith, of A LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN fame, as Whitehead, and Wheatley regular Michael Smiley as O'Neill. And I love some of the early dark humour:

Friend: You think about a thing before you touch it, am I right? 

Whitehead: Is that not usual? 

Friend: Not in Essex. 

Brilliant!

A FIELD IN ENGLAND was released simultaneously in cinemas, on demand, and on TV on July 5th. It has a running time of 87 minutes and is rated 15 in the UK for strong language, one occurrence of very strong violence and gory images.

A podcast review of this film is available directly here, and by subscribing to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

SIGHTSEERS (2012)

You can listen to a podcast review of SIGHTSEERS directly here, or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

After the surreal gangster violence of DOWN TERRACE and the cult horror brutality of KILL LIST, director Ben Wheatley swung the pendulum back toward comedy with his 2012 film, SIGHTSEERS. This is black comedy at its very finest - full of dodgy sex jokes, British camp humour, jokes about gingers and the Daily Mail. 

The plot is simple:  poor, naive Tina (Alice Lowe - THIS IS JINSY) is swept off her feet by ginger Brummie Chris (Steve Oram) and taken on the holiday of her lifetime.....in a caravan!  It's all going well until she realises that rather than just get irritated by litterbugs, and sanctimonious do-gooders, he's actually murdering them.  This is revealed pretty early on, and the comedy then comes from how Tina, besotted with Chris, and actually rather liking have a guy stick up for her, is going to react to this news.  

I absolutely love this film.  It's so instantly quotable it's destined to become a cult film.  Lines like "he's not a person: he's a Daily Mail reader! or "Report THAT to the National Trust!" are pure comedy gold. The acting is pitch-perfect, there's the trademark Ben Wheatley person-getting-murdered-by-getting-run-over shot, and plenty of comedy caravan-shagging.  That said, I'm not sure how far it would translate to other countries that don't get the peculiarly British references.  

SIGHTSEERS okayed Cannes 2012 and was released in the UK, Ireland, Australia, France and New Zealand that year.  It opened earlier this year in Hungary, the Netherlands, Israel, Belgium, Poland, Germany, the USA, Qatar, Italy and Portugal.  It opens in Sweden on July 26th.

SIGHTSEERS has a running time of 88 minutes and is rated 15 for strong language, bloody violence, sex and sex references.

KILL LIST (2011) - Ben Wheatley Retrospective

You can listen to the podcast directly here or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

The next step in my retrospective of British horror director Ben Wheatley's career is the 2011 film, KILL LIST.  George Ghon reviewed the movie for this blog, but this was my first time watching the movie, and boy was I in for a shock.  

As with DOWN TERRACE, the first part of the movie is a quiet, unsettling take on modern suburbia, with snatches of violence occasionally visible beneath the cracks.  We meet Jay (Neil Maskell), a British war veteran back from what was obviously some kind of mission gone berserk in Kiev.  Jay clearly loves his wife and young son, but he's also clearly got some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder, compounded by his wife putting pressure on him to make some money. She leads him explicitly back into partnership with another ex-soldier called Gal (Michael Smiley) who brings him into the world of contract killing.  

What I love about this first act is that with Laurie Rose's handheld shooting style and Robin Hill's almost art-house Mallickian editing, combining voice-over or dialogue with a shot of a contemplative character, we get a real sense of intimacy with the family. I also love the foreshadowing - the idea that play-violence is everywhere - roughing up on the lawn, playing with toy swords - but that the real thing is just around the corner.  That said,  at this stage of the film I thought the hints of cult behaviour were a bit cheesy - viz Gal's weird girlfriend scratching a cult symbol on the back of Jay's mirror and stuffing his blood-stained tissue into her bra.  That seemed to me less scary than just embarrassing.

In the second act we see Jay and Gal embark on their kill list, and as with DOWN TERRACE, the movie strikes an uneasy comedy-horror tone as their deadpan nonsense banter is interspersed with acts of violence that go from being off-screen and subtly hinted at to more and more explicit. Even worse is the genuinely disturbing feeling that the victims actually want to be killed. This, for me, is where the movie really kicks into gear, just as Jay starts to unravel and we get hints of what may have gone wrong in Kiev.  As for the third act, well, I can't reveal too much or else spoil it for you, but suffice to say that it goes batshit crazy in the best way, with cultish violence, third-act reveals of who's pulling the strings.  But for a more spoiler-ish discussion of its textured and provocative denouement, feel free to stay listening to the podcast after the show-notes!

KILL LIST played the festival circuit in 2011 including SXSW, Frightfest and Toronto.  It was released that year in the UK and Ireland, and the following year in the USA.

KILL LIST has a running time of 95 minutes and was rated 18 in the UK  for strong violence and language. It is available to rent and own.

George Ghon comments on KILL LIST

Here's a quick comment from Fashion writer, editor and stylist, not to mention friend of the blog, George Ghon:

British film doesn’t have a tradition of complete genre mash up à la Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, the two visionary directors who have pumped some pulp and horror into the American gangster film. Writer-director Ben Wheatley's (DOWN TERRACE) style is subtler, a bit more creepy, but no less genre defying. 

In his new feature KILL LIST,  he starts with a working class family drama that takes unexpected turns, evolving into a brutal hit-man saga, before finally plunging into the darkest territories of human interactions. It is deeply unsettling to watch, mainly due to the tension it creates between the normality of suburban life and scenes of surreal violence. 

A couple raises a 7 year old son, the father takes him on a casual stroll along the river, before he sets off to a series of kills, which is his job, but not only that. They are not handled professionally, but with utter, abhorrence for the victims, a style to kill that results from a dark past, which is left blank, unexplained, just exists as a haunting shadow. 

Reality is cut up, quite literally in an edit (Robin Hill) that occasionally runs the sound on a different time frame than the image, weirdly showing a character talking when he is actually displayed in silence on the screen. There are also gaps in the story line, certain things just don’t make sense, and the end is as chilling as it is ambiguous and hard to understand. But that does not take away the subliminal power that this film exerts, relying on close-up documentary style filming (DP Laurie Rose), and improvised dialogue. A welcome sign that filmmaking has not come to an end of commercialized standards that make us fall asleep every time we take a tenner out of our pockets in order to enter a movie theatre.

KILL LIST played Frightfest 2011 and is currently on release in the UK and Ireland. It will be shown at the Strasbourg European Fantasy Festival on September 17th.