Thursday, May 27, 2021

In The Earth: The Forest Primeval

Something I’d like to see more of are, for lack of a better term, psychedelic horror films. Sure, the word conjures up very specific ideas, mostly to do with the Sixties and hippie culture, and though there’s nothing wrong with that, I think there have been some fairly good movies of late that expand beyond that specific time and space. Consider Beyond The Black Rainbow, Mandy, and even Annihilation, Possessor, and Ahi Va El Diablo to a certain extent. Lords Of Salem flirted with it and could have leaned into it harder, but it was kind of a confused mess as it was. Hell, as much as I dislike remakes, I wouldn’t mind seeing someone good take a run at a new version of Altered States. Films that push beyond delusion and instead bend and warp reality into something completely other scratch a very specific itch for me.

In The Earth is, for the most part, a worthwhile addition to that little corner of film. It’s trippy and brutal in equal measure, telling a story of the roles of art and science in communing with nature. Which may not sound especially frightening, but it works. It does lose the plot toward the end, but until that point it’s extremely atmospheric and unsettling.

The film opens cryptically, on shots of a forest as seen through a hole in a standing stone, like an eye, or a void. A man smashes some rock with an axe, and plants a shard of it in the ground. We cut to Martin Lowery, who has just arrived at a research site in a remote wooded area in England. The area is unusually fertile - things grow really, really well there, and he’s come to assist the lead researcher - Dr. Olivia Wendle - with her investigation into the local flora. There may be something of use to be learned, things that might help improve the hardiness of crops. Martin walks up to the lodge where the research team is based, and stops at a checkpoint. People in hazmat suits come out and spray him down. He bears it patiently, like it’s routine. Inside, there’s paperwork, a piss test, a blood draw, confirmation that he’s been in quarantine for four months. Everyone’s wearing masks.

As it turns out, this is all just part of daily life - there’s a global pandemic going on in this world too. It doesn’t figure heavily into the story, but a lot of the establishing details hit very differently than in your usual films that take place during some kind of plague - it’s all very routine and commonplace, but seeing it in a movie as a fact of life instead of the central conceit is itself sort of unsettling. Once all of Martin’s documentation is in order, he’s introduced to Alma, a park ranger assigned to guide him out to the lead researcher’s camp, a two-day walk from the lodge. No roads, no quad trails, they’ll be doing this on foot, taking supplies out to Dr. Wendle. 

Before they leave, Martin notices a painting on a wall in the lodge. The lodge’s owner explains that it’s a depiction of Parnag Fegg, a local legend. It’s a woodland spirit, part folk tale, part boogeyman used to scare children into obedience. It looks a lot like the stone from the beginning.

Apparently, nobody’s heard from Dr. Wendle in months.

Martin and Alma head into the deep woods and it becomes very clear very quickly that Martin isn’t much of an outdoorsman, and that he lied when he told the doctor back at the lodge that he’d been keeping up his exercise in quarantine. Martin’s an interesting character - he is not in any way, shape, or form a heroic man. There’s something meek and hesitant about him, almost bordering on petulant. He seems like someone profoundly out of his depth. Alma, by contrast, is in her element. She’s tough and practical and focused. She’s trying to do her job, because these are not tamed lands. This is the wild, and people get lost here all the time. An entire research team went missing not that long ago, as a matter of fact. She has to keep Martin safe and moving. 

Beyond this, it’s tough to talk about the story, because so much of what makes this movie good is the way it twists, and does so with little to no warning. But you’ve got the outlines - it’s an unusually fertile forest reputedly home to some kind of pagan spirit, and there have been a lot of mysterious disappearances lately. What I think makes the film work is the way it weaves together what you’re expecting from a story with this framework with things you probably weren’t expecting. It’s very terse in its composition - there are lots of quick shots and sudden cuts, some almost feel premature, moving away slightly before the action is completed (this extends to a lot of strobing imagery in the second half, so this one’s off the table for anyone prone to seizures). Likewise, the characters don’t talk a lot, and when they do there’s a brusqueness to it. The action and dialogue feel naturalistic, but the clipped style to the pace and editing makes it all feel slightly fragmented. This extends to the dynamic of the action as well - things turn ugly quickly, out of nowhere. There isn’t a ton of violence but what’s there is sudden and awful, depicted without fanfare and sharply observed. It happens in real time and in striking still images, drawn out for maximum discomfort and lightning-fast alike. All of this combines to create an atmosphere of persistent discomfort. 

This, then is in contrast with things like the cinematography and sound design. There are lots of shots of nature in slow motion and almost microscopic close up, making everything look surreal and alien in a fashion similar to Color Out Of Space. It’s all soundtracked with woozy, monolithic synthesizers that evokes everything from classic science fiction scores to traditional psychedelica to tectonic, rumbling tone generation. You get the sense that these choppy, hesitant human lives are stories playing out against a vast, slow natural world that tolerates their presence for its own reasons. It’s a film that revolves around the reality that nature is a living organism and pits pagan folk tales against science. It asks the question: How do we commune with nature, and should we even try? As the characters explore these questions, the world around them turns stranger and stranger, before collapsing entirely into kaleidoscopic visions of a world they can barely comprehend.

It’s largely a strong effort, but it does have some problems. The second half, the last act especially, feels like it’s trying to cram in a bunch of ideas about nature and consciousness and our role in the ecosystem that it doesn’t really develop. It actually does a pretty good job of everything making sense in context for most of its runtime, which is no mean feat, given how weird and kind of cerebral its premise is. But it loses its way in the climax, I think, sacrificing development of all of those ideas for a firehose of imagery pointed directly at our eyeballs in the end. 

It’s one of the pitfalls psychedelic horror can fall into - it tends to sacrifice story for imagery, and I’m not saying that’s a bad thing necessarily, but if you’re going to do that, you really need to commit and just pour it on throughout and let the audience take the ride. This film presents a pretty compelling story, but instead of following the story to increasingly stranger places, it sort of sets the story up and then ends on a lot of imagery, and so you feel kind of cheated. Which is too bad, because up to that point you have something uncomfortable and sinister and very smartly executed.

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