This low-budget folk-horror is back in Wheatley’s weird, sly world as Joel Fry and Ellora Torchia get lost in the forest
Here is a low-budget, low-profile film that scampers through the undergrowth up to a horrible folk-horror epiphany, with undeadpan
comedy and a gibbering shroom meltdown, percussively hammered home with strobe lightning flashes and skull-splittingly loud snaps. At one point, we are encircled by a fog, which a frowning scientist describes as a “suspension of mushroom spores and water droplets in the air”. It was one of those rare moments when you are glad of a mask in the cinema. This is a return to home territory for its writer-director Ben Wheatley, maybe reminiscent of his 17th-century Leveller freakout A Field in
England from 2013, which was about civil war deserters captured by an alchemist and finding the world turned upside down. And there are admittedly some familiar tropes: forests where mobile phone signals are impossible, a local myth represented in ancient woodcuts. But for me In the Earth is a return to form, after Wheatley’s interesting but basically uncertain dabble last year in period romantic drama for
Netflix with a new version of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca with Armie Hammer and Lily James. In the Earth brings us back to Wheatley’s classic world of occult loopy weirdness and cult Britmovie seediness, with a new topical dimension of pandemic paranoia, and what keeps you watching is its unreadable, almost undetectable thread of black comedy.