Ben Wheatley

  • In the Earth (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) There are movies that I like better once I figure out where they’re coming from, and In the Earth is one of them. I still don’t like it after learning its full story, but at least I can now understand the achievement in making it happen. In a few words: In the Earth is a quick-and-dirty project for writer-director Ben Wheatley, who shot the entire thing in fifteen days in-between his work on the far bigger Rebecca and Tomb Raider 2. Wheatley may be a big-budget director working with comprehensible plots these days, but his first few movies were far less accessible low-budget horror with esoteric components, and even his first few “big” movies, like Free Fire or High Rise, were unusual pieces of work. In the Earth goes back to those roots as it follows hiking scientists when they enter a mysterious forest and meet some very strange people. Going for folk horror, body mutilation and psychedelic experiences, In the Earth is clearly a quick-and-low-budget effort: the cinematography benefits from the forested surroundings, but remains gritty and almost accidental. A few savvily-used special effects (and an impeccable sense of design aping Penguin classics for the credits) help raise the visual polish of the production. The handful of characters is easy to manage, and the film regularly goes for occult imagery to create unease. It doesn’t amount to much, though: strange spooky stuff, forest spirit, and homicidal humans. So what? The ending doesn’t satisfy much. But contextualizing this as a 15-day production in the middle of a pandemic between two bigger projects does make it slightly more sympathetic. Most filmmakers would have enjoyed a few weeks off—but Wheatley heads into the forest and makes a movie. I have to admire that, even if the result itself leaves me cold. In the Earth will appeal most to those looking for a specific flavour of British occult horror—there are plenty of parallels to make here with Wheatley’s earlier A Field in England.

  • Rebecca (2020)

    Rebecca (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, December 2021) As someone with a surprising fondness for the original Daphne Du Maurier novel Rebecca and some admiration for the 1940 Alfred Hitchcock film, I was curiously ambivalent about the idea of a remake. Maybe there should be a statute in the Academy Awards that Best Pictures should not be remade. Maybe, on the other hand, a modern look at the classic gothic romance would be interesting in itself. This 2020 version of Rebecca, as it turns out, is somewhere in the middle. Director Ben Wheatley established himself as a director of oddball projects, so he wasn’t necessarily a bad choice here… but the result seems beneath what one could expect from him. I have some appreciation for how the film adapts and changes its tone and visual language as the story advances — surprisingly light, sunny and colourful in the first act as our heroine meets a rich man and falls in love with him during a whirlwind vacation romance. Then, as the story moves to the unsettling Manderley domain, everything gradually darkens and becomes grimmer, all the way to the late film’s murder and incarceration subplot. By the third act, we’re deep in gothic suspense, queer cinema subtext, our heroine doing her best to free the man she loves and the final, celebrated finale. Rebecca works and doesn’t betray the original novel, but the result is likely to be forgotten remarkably quickly — it’s decent but hardly exceptional.

  • Kill List (2011)

    Kill List (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2020) Maybe I was expecting too much. Kill List came highly recommended, hailed as a fine piece of British horror filmmaking from iconoclast writer-director Ben Wheatley. Of course, I’ve had mixed reactions to Wheatley’s other movies (High-Rise, Free Fire)—They get roughly three fourths of the way to a good movie, and sputter along the way. Worse yet; it seems to be an intentional refusal to go all the way, as Wheatley would rather follow his own artistic intentions than to deliver anything conventionally entertaining. So it is that from afar, Kill List certainly sounds interesting—it starts as a domestic drama that features a hitman with PTSD, then turns into an eerie contract killing film, then goes full bore in folk horror with mysterious cultists in modern Britain. But in the end, it’s intriguing, then annoying, then frustrating. The mysteries introduced are not resolved, the film gets increasingly violent and sadistic the longer it goes on, and it gets so dark (in a detached kind of way) that it’s hard to actually care about any of it—even the protagonist is severely flawed, and not necessarily someone for whom we’d feel anything. The lead actor himself isn’t particularly charismatic either, but the biggest issue is with the script or lack thereof—apparently, much of the movie was improvised, which is a surefire way to make me grumpy. By the end, I was more ready to shrug than care for the ending offered on-screen. Kill List is not a complete loss—the sense of domesticity gradually succumbing to unknowable horror is not bad—but it just doesn’t make the most out of its assets.

  • Free Fire (2016)

    Free Fire (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2019) When I say that Free Fire isn’t quite as successful as it could be, this isn’t as bad a review as you’d expect. For one thing, it actually tries something somewhat ambitious: a genre thriller in which an ensemble cast sustain an extended shootout inside a run-down warehouse. It takes a lot of cleverness to stage such a lengthy sequence while keeping it intelligible, visually exciting, differentiating the characters and yet sustain the action over nearly ninety minutes. That the film doesn’t quite succeed does not invalidate the work required to bring it there. Alas, there’s a feeling that for all of writer-director Ben Wheatley’s inventiveness, there’s something missing from the result. The film doesn’t quite create the compelling viewing that such an exercise would suggest. Being unbelievably violent, it’s not joyful in the least (the high body count, including two lamented late-movie deaths, doesn’t help), and for all of the script’s rather good writing, there isn’t as much cool dialogue as could be hoped for. In short, Free Fire is not bad but it’s still a fair way away from the genre classic it could have been: the characters are bit bland — Brie Larson and Armie Hammer do well as the only competent ones in the place; the other cast members not so memorably—and the action doesn’t quite capture the full mayhem that could have been. I still consider it a good time viewing, but it could have been much more.

  • High-Rise (2015)

    High-Rise (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2017) I read J.G. Ballard’s dystopian novel so long ago that I had no real expectations for the movie adaptation except “go ahead and do justice to the source material’s insanity”. Yet I was disappointed. The first half-hour of High-Rise is simply fantastic, as our protagonist moves into a high-rise apartment building that’s nearly a world upon itself. But there’s madness in the building, and it doesn’t take the unsolicited advances of his upstairs neighbour to figure it out—before long, the building has stratified itself in upper-versus lower classes, with violence and anarchy (and, heaven forbid, uncollected heaps of trash) being the new normal. The setup is terrific, but the execution of the premise less so—basic world-building details don’t make sense (the decision to set the film in the seventies gives and takes away), the film seems to lose itself in less interesting subplots and our protagonist eventually seems to be nothing more than a bystander to a brutal social breakdown. While he eventually copes with it (as shown by the brilliantly deranged first scene), the film literally doesn’t go any further. The satire is unevenly handled and while some of the quotes are delicious, the film itself seems to be looking for something to do in its second half. Too bad; High-Rise has a sense of surreal anarchy that occasionally works well. At least there are a few good performances in the mix. Tom Hiddleston doesn’t do much but looks good doing so, while much of the same can also be done with Sienna Miller. Meanwhile, Elisabeth Moss does have a more challenging role. This is my first film from writer/director Ben Wheatley and while I’m not completely displeased by the results, it’s not necessarily a slam-dunk that will lead me to seek out the rest of his filmography. In the meantime, High-Rise doesn’t embarrass the source novel, but it doesn’t do it full justice either.