In The Earth (2021), 28th May
107 minutes, dir. Ben Wheatley
Spoilers and interpretation of themes follows
Unlike Local Hero the day before, In The Earth has very much been on my radar for some time due to the on-screen presence of Reece Shearsmith.
Unlike Local Hero the day before, this was viewed at a terrible angle in my mum's sitting room.
Unlike Local Hero the day before, this screening was interrupted by cat/dog drama, cups of tea, and way too many questions like "Who was that? What was he doing? Why?" Some of those could be answered by, "I don't know, it's a horror, the mystery is unfolding," and some by "If you paid attention to the film rather than Candy Crush, maybe you'd have an idea."
Against all the odds, I enjoyed In The Earth a great deal. Solid cast - even though it was Reece Shearsmith's name that caught my eye, Joel Fry (or 'him out of Plebs' to my mum, and 'the guy from Our Flag Means Death' to me - remembering faces over names is genetic) is also really good in this.
Incidentally, I'm so glad I watched all the credits to see Cyriak credited with certain sequences. Definitely made sense in retrospect. The Clint Mansell soundtrack made me beam; it reminded me maybe of the original Suspiria but I'm not sure that's what I was thinking of. There's something about otherworldly synth music in the context of the forest that makes the familiar strange and threatening. Yes please.
So, it was made during the pandemic. The credits thank family and friends for maintaining their bubble and keeping safe. It's also set during a pandemic, but not the one that the audience lived through. It seems to have been more severe, or at least the accompanying lockdowns were more prolonged.
Spoilers beyond this point.
It then takes a turn into folk horror, which is interesting as the genre so often relies on the whole village coming together around the wicker man or what have you. In The Earth has a cast of five, which doesn't lend itself so much to that imagery, although now I think about it, maybe that's what the fungi were all up to.
Speaking of fungi: my mother, infuriatingly, said at the end "So it was all a big mushroom trip, was it?" And... I don't know, I felt the same way I feel when people dismiss art as the product of psychedelics, and it's not like I'm exactly mad about them (I've never taken any, even), but it feels wilfully reductive.
I thought the film had a lot more to say about how we search for patterns in things to try and make sense of our experiences. I don't know how much the film itself 'believes' in the supernatural explanation for what the characters experience; I felt like most of the phenomena could probably be attributed to natural causes, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that every one of those characters has undergone isolation (legally mandated, self-inflicted, and/or forced) and responds to this trauma by trying to make sense of what's happening around them. Which, yes, I suppose is a bit of a trip.
It's an insight into how superstitions and rituals form and are maintained. Wendell, the scientist, is ritualistic in her research, the results of which are beginning to sound implausible to say the least. Zack (Shearsmith) chooses to pursue art and sacrifice to serve the same ends. Everyone had their lockdown projects, I guess.