A Field In England: Other People, Not Necessarily Hell

I’ve got a pretty generous definition for what constitutes horror, hence my use of the term “scary movies” as a replacement, since all kinds of stuff can be scary, not just what is conventionally labeled horror, but sometimes even I find myself a little baffled as to how a film might end up marketed as horror. It can’t - or at least shouldn’t -be the mere presence of graphic violence, because something can be horrifying without being graphically violent, and not everything that is graphically violent is scary. I mean, I don’t think films like Friday the 13th are actually scary, though tastes vary on that count. As I’ve said before, for me it’s more about the feelings or moods evoked by a film that make it a scary movie - it has to scare or unnerve or unsettle or disturb, whatever the trappings.

Even though it’s labeled “horror,” A Field In England isn’t all that scary. It’s somewhat unnerving, yes, but otherwise, it strikes me more as absurdist black comedy, like Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, plus some witchcraft.

The time is the 16th century, and the place is, well, England. It’s the English Civil War, and we’re dropped into the film as a man cowers in a hedge while a pitched battle rages around him. The man, the coward Whitehead, is not a soldier by any means. He’s apprenticed to an alchemist, tasked with tracking down and apprehending O’Neil, a fellow apprentice who has made off with some of their master’s documents and materials. His attempts to evade the battle bring him into the company of first Jacob and Trower, two soldiers themselves eager to get away from battle, who may or may not be on opposing sides, and then of Friend, a fool who cannot seem to stay dead. Whitehead enlists these three to help him search for O’Neil, as they march across a seemingly endless field, moving further and further away from the clamor of battle.

And they do find O’Neil, in this vast field, bordered by forest. And that’s when their fortunes change.

It’s not immediately clear what’s happening - once O’Neil is found (in a dizzying, hallucinatory sequence that suggests he has concealed himself with the aid of magic), he presses Trower, Jacob, Friend, and Whitehead into locating and digging up some kind of treasure, but as the film progresses, the treasure ends up being kind of a MacGuffin, overshadowed by the malign influence of the field in which they’re searching. Whitehead begins to experience visions that are oblique in meaning, possibly prophetic, and the rest turn on each other, their already tenuous trust abandoned. There are suggestions that there are supernatural forces at work in the field, but everything is so odd and disjointed already in its cinematic and narrative conceits that it doesn’t really build a lot of tension. There are some unsettling sequences, but they occur in isolation, and there’s as much comedy as anything else, ranging from dry wit to outright violent slapstick (it’s hard to go wrong with a good smack to the face with a shovel). The result is not scary so much as unsettling or unnerving, but that’s largely a product of how utterly dislocated the audience is from the film, insofar as it takes place in the distant past and the narrative is not a conventional linear one.

Part of that dislocation has to do with the setting. The dialogue (which has some really nice Shakespearian rhythms to it) and dress are period-appropriate for the 17th century, and it’s shot in black and white, and so we’re distanced from the characters by the unfamiliarity of the time period and their language, and distanced from the setting by its presentation in black and white. On top of that, there’s a surreal abstractness to it that recalls the Theater of the Absurd - the film is punctuated by smash cuts to black, which serve to divide it into vignettes or chapters, and these are sometimes bookended or interrupted by tableaux, where the actors stand still in stylized, dramatic poses, as if the events of the film are slowly becoming the woodcut illustrations which would depict them in that time period. So it’s as much theatrical as cinematic. The music is a mixture of electronics and period-appropriate songs and instrumentation, sometimes juxtaposing the mournful, or violent, or the profane with the whimsical. It’s odd to see a black and white film described in press blurbs as “psychedelic,” but there are sequences of strobing, mirror-imaged scenes used to indicate the presence of magic or something of evil portent, along with unconventional shot framing and composition, and so the film is both a product of antiquity in how its characters look and speak and think, and something more modern in how it’s presented to the audience. The result is a little jarring, though not in a bad way, and it’s well-executed and engaging, but I’m not really sure that it is, at any point, horrifying. A bunch of characters, brought together by fate, wandering to little purpose across an endless landscape as they slowly crumble or implode makes for an interesting film, just not one I’d call horror.

IMDB entry
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