Why, oh why, do I keep doing this to myself? After the pretentious nonsense of 2013's A Field In England, I thought I was done with the oeuvre of auteur Ben Wheatley... but then I saw that he had made a new rural horror film that the trailers managed to make look quite intriguing.
While the world is consumed by the latest pandemic, scientist and city boy Martin Lowery (Game of Thrones' Joel Fry) and park ranger Alma (Ellora Torchia) head into a quarantined area of forest outside of Bristol to deliver equipment to researcher Olivia Wendle (Hayley Squires), who has set up camp deep in the woods.
During their second night of camping on the long journey through difficult terrain, Alma and Martin are attacked in their sleep, their radio is destroyed, and their shoes are stolen.
The following day Martin cuts his foot badly while continuing on barefoot, but they soon run into an apparent homeless man, Zach (The League of Gentleman's Reece Shearsmith) who takes them to his camp.
Very quickly it becomes clear that Zach is up to no good, and is actually trying to make contact with a woodland entity - Parnag Fegg - through symbolism and sacrifice.
Eventually, our protagonists escape his clutches and stumble into Wendle's encampment, only to realise that the scientist is as barmy as Zach.
While, he was using ritual, she using science, but heavily influenced by an old, occult tome that mentions the nearby standing stone around which all this weirdness seems to revolve.
As with A Field in England, In The Earth is largely a pompous, po-faced, mess of style over substance, but peppered with moments of pseudo torture porn and squirm-inducing injury detail, almost entirely inflicted on Martin.
For some reason, this film is allowed to run for 107 minutes, and, boy, does it feel it. When Wheatley isn't bombarding our senses with strobe lighting or flickering subliminal images (which I wouldn't object to if I felt they had some meaning), he's allowing his antagonists to monologue incessantly.
I guess the writer-director believes he has an ear for dialogue, but more often than not it comes across as peculiarly mannered and stilted, akin to a poor student film.
Echoing 2018's Annihilation, the underlying story of In The Earth suggests that nature is 'fighting back' against mankind (and is possibly responsible for creating the unspecified plague affecting the globe... but I might be giving the plot too much credit there).
Both Zach and Olivia are taking different paths to opening a dialogue with an anthropomorphic avatar of nature, the mycrrhizal mat, a network connecting all the plant life in the area, to, essentially, negotiate a peace treaty.
And this core idea is interesting and worthy of investigation, but In The Earth doesn't do it justice.
I'm of an age where I don't need everything explained in a horror movie to get that its conceit is frightening, as long as there is the suggestion of an intelligent design behind it all.
However, Wheatley's "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" approach actually undermines the uneasiness of the scenario.
There was a moment, in the final act, when Olivia was fine tuning her son et lumière communication devices, that I thought this drivel was about to be salvaged by some Quatermass-level fringe science, but sadly the plot opted to devolve into a psychedelic, early Pink Floyd music video (but without the great tunes).
What should have been terrifying was simply annoying.
Clearly Wheatley has enough fans that he can continue to gain funding for these arthouse horror projects, but I definitely don't count myself among their number.