Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10

Cast: Joel Fry, Ellora Torchia, Reece Shearsmith, Hayley Squires, John Hollingsworth, Mark Monroe.

Not so gentle are the sleepers in that quiet Earth, or so we might come to believe when we find that nature has turned her back on us and makes us reap all that we have sown, all that we have buried underground.

Whilst many might avoid such encounters with films that deal with the notion and after effects of a pandemic, understandable in the days of an actual one encircling the world and dividing opinion constantly, to seek answers, wherever they may lay, to glean understanding, no matter how small, or even minor, of how we may be taken down several paths of existence is perhaps the most important way of surviving what comes next.

In The Earth, written and directed by Ben Wheatley is an intense and shrewd film which relies on the uncomfortable to good effect. Not so much a horror film but one that embraces the sense of false confinement in what is essentially the open space. Such is the warped nature of the filmmaking, the kaleidoscope touches so seemingly embraced during the film’s climatic ending that what the viewer is left with is confusion, arguably intentional, and one that is designed to enhance the feeling of unease that had spiralling since the initial first frames of the tale.

That the pandemic which has threatened humanity barely truly is explained away, is in the end neither here nor there, what matters more is the unreleased issues that come with the knock on effect of such pandemics, the sense of isolation, the drop into madness and psychosis that can take hold of the human mind, and when that isolation is disturbed the sense of fear, of strangers, of habit being shifted, is palpable.

The film, whilst exploring these themes with insightful attitude, and with adding the mythos of the Parnag Fegg, unfortunately adds very little to the detail placed before the watcher in films such as the entrancing Midsommar, and even with a nod to the great Stephen King in an act of savage brutality which will make even the hardened of horror and suspense followers’ wince and turn their heads, and yet the acting and the pace of the film are to be taken as seriously as anything in the genre.

In that quiet earth…lays the seeds of hope and of destruction, the forests and the woods, the spirits that we deny, all is visible when we finally accept our own downfall. In The Earth is a good film, undeniably a little odd, confusing at times, but one that implores you to figure out the ending for yourself, just as in how we have been guided to a finality brought about by societal change in recent years, so we too must adapt our own ending when it comes to art; and in that Ben Wheatley leaves us thirsty for more. 

Ian D. Hall