In the Earth

Ben Wheatley is a peculiar director. I've seen five of his films and none of them impressed me, and if you feel the same way, then In the Earth won't impress you either. The director made the film for a small budget during the coronavirus, with three characters in a forest. Coincidentally, also the film also features a virus raging. A scientist and a park ranger venture into the deep forest for research. They encounter a third character and nothing goes according to plan. That's basically the story, there's not much else to it, so fans of plots won't find much satisfaction, and unfortunately, fans of horror, action, mystery, or anything genuinely interesting that is worth paying attention to won't find satisfaction either. There are only about two horror scenes in total (the scissors in the eye are great, the fingers chopped off with an axe are relatively decent, but for a 100-minute runtime, it's somewhat insufficient). In the final twenty minutes, there's a flickering stroboscope, which was possibly supposed to be the "psycho" element, but it almost gave me an epileptic seizure, so no thanks. A waste of time, it didn't give me anything, I silently wished for it to end. 4/10. (2021.05.08)

Ben Wheatley set out to pick mushrooms in the forest during the lockdown and made a film containing two paradoxes. The first is that he is unable to free himself from the context of the pandemic, even though it doesn’t add anything, but rather comes across as utterly unnecessary. The second, and clearly more tragic, paradox is that In the Earth is a supremely sensory work that can fully make an impact only in the cinema, where it is possible to completely surrender to its perceptions, but nobody has been able to properly see it on the big screen. (2022.01.08)