During the English Civil War, an alchemist's cowardly assistant, Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith), is tasked with tracking down rogue alchemist O'Neill (Michael Smiley) after the villain made off with some occult tomes that belonged to Whitehead's master.
Caught up on the periphery of a battle, Whitehead falls in with a trio of deserters who are making their way across a field towards a tavern - little realising that one of these men, Cutler (Ryan Pope), is actually in league with O'Neill.
The men are captured by O'Neill - with Cutler's aid - and forced to help him in his search for buried treasure. Only, instead, they unearth "terrifying energies trapped inside the field".
On paper this set-up sounds promising and reading the critical response to the film (courtesy of the film's Wikipedia page) I knew I was in for something a bit out of the ordinary.
What I got instead was a pretentious 'student film project' with inflated ideas about its own self-importance.
I find it truly mind-boggling that "serious film critics" have no problems slagging off Hollywood blockbusters that are meant to be pure entertainment but sit them in front of drivel like A Field In England and they will pontificate on its "challenging nature" and "audaciousness" until the cows come home rather than simply saying: that was a load of shit.
As an indicator of how shallow the film actually is, at one point we're hit with the stunningly original revelation that the real treasure in the field was not gold but the friendship that had developed between the men. Pass the bucket, please, I think I'm going to throw up.
It's not as if A Field In England is even that well made.
There's some very poor editing choices (particularly when - for no explained reason - the men are suddenly having a tug-of-war match with an unseen opponent, who may have been an intricately engraved post but this is never entirely clear) and the hallucinogenic sequence that comes in at about the hour mark - and seems to go on forever - is quite clever in parts but ultimately serves little purpose beyond giving the viewer a headache. Woe betide anyone with photosensitive epilepsy who accidentally watches this (there is a warning at the start of the film).
Let's not even dwell on the moments when suddenly all the actors stand stock still - in obviously 'very important' poses - like children playing statues when the music stops.
And that bit in my plot summary above about the "terrifying forces trapped inside the field", I only got that that from the blurb on the back of the Blu-Ray. You certainly don't get that from the film. The men eat some magic mushrooms, go a bit loopy (cue strobing, kaleidoscopic flashing imagery) then someone off-camera turns on a giant wind machine that blows over O'Neill's tent!
Things happen without explanation that we are, presumably, supposed to view as "highly significant" but instead just come across as daft as they have no context (such as the fellow who comes back to life and alerts O'Neill to where his friends are hiding, then the next thing you know he's attacking O'Neill).
But talking of things happening without explanation there's no real justification for shooting the film in black and white - except to go some way (but not far enough) to masking its £300,000 budget. It also only involves five actors on screen for 99 per cent of the movie (there's a brief cameo from The Mighty Boosh's Julian Barratt at the start) and all the action takes place in a single field.
In a nutshell, this has to be the biggest waste of 90 minutes of my life I've endured in a long while. I simply can't recommend A Field In England to anyone as there is nothing here that hasn't been done better elsewhere.
I was hoping for a minimalist slice of magic realism or avant-garde horror to add to my library of very British rural horror films that I so adore, but instead I got a headache and a nagging sense that I'd just been conned out of the cost of a Blu-Ray.
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