Recensioni de* critic*

There's a lot of screaming and crying and lot of pain, and it would all be unbearable if Wheatley didn't exhibit such mordant wit... Where the film fails as a substantive statement about this or that or the other thing, it succeeds as a visceral exercise in audience torment.

But more important than its sense of syncing with a contemporary moment is the sense that it’s also a reactive movie in regards to our global state of emergency. The natural world gives us the resources to live. It also gives us viruses. And while some characters seek to chart aspects of nature and others wish to pay loving tribute (and offer sacrifices) to it, the most resonant notion from Earth‘s characters is that nature is a living, breathing, and undeniably aggressive entity.

The film rattles apart as it goes along until it resorts to a couple of hallucinatory freakout sequences in place of an ending. But In the Earth is deflating not just because it runs out of gas and ideas so quickly and relies on a scattering of disturbing imagery... to make up for its hollowness. It’s also a waste for never managing, after that reverberant opening, to link its vision of the pandemic to its central story in any substantive way.

Wheatley, who led hit men into a den of occult ritual in “Kill List,” isn’t one to let coherence get in the way of a good high concept. Expecting “In the Earth” to reconcile its influences (is this a plague movie, a folktale or science fiction?) is missing the point.

After a while, In the Earth becomes less a fantastical eco-thriller and more of a remote, luridly bedazzling art object. After all, Wheatley’s brand of lo-fi maximalism has its limitations. In the Earth’s mythology is at once inscrutable, over-explicit, and meaningless, while its ending is less ambiguous than murky.

While not a total win, In the Earth remains a much-needed leap back in the right direction for Wheatley, coming off the back of his redundant remake of Rebecca, a shrug of a film that could have been directed by just about anyone rather than someone of such verve and perversity.

[A]t times, he seems even to be calling back to his own “A Field in England.” It’s not that these flourishes aren’t effective – some moments are intensely visceral, if a touch overwhelming. But they never feel organic to the material. And as with “Free Fire” and “High Rise,” he’s quite good at creating onscreen chaos, but unskilled (or uninterested) in retaining control of his narratives after doing so.

Whatever else lo-fi genre hybrid In the Earth may be, it’s indisputably 100% a Ben Wheatley film. Returning to idiosyncratic terrain after his incongruously decorous Rebecca remake, Wheatley offers a science-fiction/occult scarer that sets its own tone while reworking tropes that he previously explored in Kill List and the supremely offbeat historical drama A Field in England.

In the Earth cheerfully tosses necromancy, mycorrhizal networks (fungi to you and me), unsolved missing-child cases from the 1970s, abstract hallucinations and more into the cauldron, before dipping in a tankard and pouring a draught down your throat. Wheatley and his collaborators have produced something that some of us thought would be impossible: an outrageously entertaining film that feels utterly rooted in the bleak era in which it was made.

“In the Earth” is an impressive exercise in cinematic resourcefulness. As the glossy and well-furnished blandness of his “Rebecca” made clear, Wheatley’s best films mix a black-witted nihilism with the anarchic fun of a kid messing around with an 8mm camera in his parents’ backyard. All he really needs are a few ominous props, a handful of committed actors, and a good excuse to make things go squish — everything else feels like it just gets in the way.

The film feels right in line with the kind of mayhem that Wheatley has been serving up his entire career, including some graphically gory details that are hard to unsee.

While there’s certainly a relatable point of view in its depiction of pandemic anxiety taken to extremes in which social isolation breeds distrust in science and an embrace of occult superstitions, the story has too little consistent logic and the characters too little depth to provide a hook. Instead, it becomes a numbing bore, teasing the viewer by withholding details as to whether the menace is supernatural or human in the form of off-the-grid nutjobs, to the point where you no longer care.