Ben Wheatley has cemented his position as one of the UK’s most exciting and unpredictable talents since his debut with Down Terrace in 2009, with films such as Kill List, Sightseers, A Field in England, High Rise, and Free Fire. While he is arguably still best known for his low-budget horrors, Wheatley continues to push himself, from In the Earth (shot in 15 days during the pandemic) to the $130-odd million blockbuster The Meg 2: The Trench.
His new film, Bulk, is a high-octane genre-bending thriller that promises to be a wild ride. The genres and scales may have changed, but you’ll find many of the same trademarks throughout his work. Let’s take a trip into the mind of Ben Wheatley.
Dark Comedy
Even a film like Kill List, arguably his darkest movie, has a rich seam of dark comedy running through it. Free Fire is a shoot-em-up with IRA members and arms dealers having a protracted battle in a warehouse, but it’s more farce than action movie.
Down Terrace, which follows a crime family murdering each other to find the rat in their group, is hilarious in places, while Sightseers is a laugh-out-loud dark comedy about a pair of murderers on a road trip through the Peak District and Yorkshire.
Things aren’t clean in Wheatley’s films; they show how clumsy and absurd violence and confrontation can be and make us laugh while they’re doing it.
Discomfort Viewing
Wheatley also enjoys making you squirm in your seat. This can be through wince-inducing gore (such as a nasty amputation scene in In The Earth), but the discomfort is often found in deeply unpleasant social settings through a fog of alcohol and cigarette smoke.
Happy New Year, Colin Burstead (originally titled Colin You Anus) is a spin on Coriolanus that follows a family New Year’s Eve party devolving into back-biting and rage. The boozy dinner argument at the start of Kill List is just as distressing as any of the horror to lies in store, and High Rise features an intensely claustrophobic, inhibition-free party sequence in full 1970s awfulness.
Chances are you’re going to be holding your breath during a Wheatley movie for one reason or another.
Folk Horror
No matter where Wheatley goes in his career, he keeps coming back to very British nightmares. The nightmarish truth lurking under Kill List is a folk horror conspiracy that has tangled hitman Jay in its web since the start. A Field in England is a black and white English Civil War horror in which Reese Shearsmith is fed magic mushrooms by an alchemist looking for buried treasure. In the Earth finds Joel Fry’s hapless scientist stranded in the woods and caught in the middle of an attempt to harness a standing stone’s power.
Few modern filmmakers have mined the true weirdness of our history and consciousness as Wheatley, locating that uncanny fear and lunacy that lurks just beneath the surface.
Class Commentary
A crucial element of Wheatley’s work is his eviscerating take on social hierarchy and class structure. There wasn’t what we’d think of as a “posh British actor” in his films until High Rise, which starred Tom Hiddleston and Jeremy Irons. It shows the elite’s sneering decadence in its true colours as they deny the lower floors’ others of any sort of equality and power (both metaphorical and literal).
Michael Smiley’s wizard in A Field in England uses his captive like a truffle pig, while the owner of the mansion that serves as the location for Colin Burstead’s New Year’s Eve do is haplessly waiting in his quarters for it all to be over. The periods may change, but the class commentary never does.
Moving Towards Action
It may have taken a while for Wheatley to make a film like Free Fire, but he’s been doing his level best to make big-budget movies for years. It shouldn’t have come as a shock to anyone that he signed on to hurl Jason Statham at giant underwater creatures in The Meg 2: The Trench. One of his great unrealised projects is Freak Shift, an action-horror hybrid that would have followed a team of monster hunters. He was signed on to direct Tomb Raider 2 for a while, and he tried to adapt Frank Miller’s Berserk graphic novel Hard Boiled. Edgar Wright isn’t the only British director with a gift for a wild action sequence.
Regular Collaborators
You’re going to see some familiar faces throughout Ben Wheatley’s films. Ben Wheatley, Michael Smiley, Reece Shearsmith, Sienna Guillory and Sam Riley have all popped up more than once, but the most important name on his repeat collaborators list is his filmmaking partner and wife, Amy Jump.
Jump has co-written and produced most of Wheatley’s films, and although she doesn’t do press, she is a crucial part of the team. He has a trusted group that you’ll see popping up in front of and behind the camera, even in his bigger movies (yes, that’s Down Terrace star and Wheatley’s frequent editor Robin Hill as a boat captain in The Meg 2).
Unpredictability
Arguably, one of the most important elements of any Ben Wheatley film is simply not knowing what to expect next. The filmmaker has kept us guessing through each of his films and each of his choices of projects. It seems entirely fitting that Bulk has been made in secret, and that he’s also been hard at work on an action thriller in the US (Normal, starring Bob Odenkirk and written by Nobody’s Derek Kolstad).
Whether it’s pivoting to TV with Doctor Who and Generation Z, directing a starry remake of Rebecca, or putting together a secret sci-fi, seeing what he’ll give us next is always a surprise.