A Field in England (Ben Wheatley, 2013)

Here, Wheatley astutely realises that what the world needs is a psychedelic spaghetti western in the style of El Topo, set in the English Civil War. Five men wander around a field somewhere to the side of the action of a battle and inside their own heads. Ostensibly, treasure is being looked for, but the real intent seems to be just to bounce the characters off each other with a jarring blend of mannered period dialogue and modern swearing, while throwing in a jumbled bag of ideas about magic and religion. The bombardment of acid-driven rapid cutting mixed with scenes of mogadoned elongation does have a powerfully hypnotic effect, and the beautifully considered monochrome photography achieves a further temporally dislocating effect, but in the final analysis you would be hard pressed to find any point to it all, beyond disorientating the viewer.

5/10