{"id":82167,"date":"2025-08-19T21:45:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-19T21:45:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/82167\/"},"modified":"2025-08-19T21:45:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T21:45:07","slug":"ben-wheatley-goes-mischievously-back-to-basics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/82167\/","title":{"rendered":"Ben Wheatley Goes Mischievously Back to Basics"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tPredicting Ben Wheatley<\/a>\u2018s next career move is never a game to bet the house on. Two years after bouncing back from his impersonal, Netflix-glossy \u201cRebecca\u201d remake with the gnarly indie eco-horror \u201cIn the Earth,\u201d the British filmmaker was handed his biggest studio budget and least typical assignment to date with 2023\u2019s sharkbuster sequel \u201cMeg 2: The Trench\u201d \u2014 a dud, most agreed. So what now? The most stubbornly anti-commercial film of his career, of course. Shot on a shoestring and seemingly written on the back of envelope that then went several rounds in the shredder, \u201cBulk<\/a>\u201d is a stunt that makes even earlier oddball Wheatley works like \u201cA Field in England\u201d look quite conventional by comparison \u2014 but there\u2019s more energy and wit in this hybrid of conspiracy thriller, time-bending sci-fi and goofy genre parody than we\u2019ve seen from the director in a while.<\/p>\n

\n\tUnveiled at the Edinburgh Film Festival<\/a> as the opener of the Midnight Madness section, \u201cBulk\u201d serves as something of a palate cleanser for Wheatley\u2019s next film, the Bob Odenkirk-starring thriller \u201cNormal\u201d \u2014 which premieres next month in Toronto\u2019s midnight program, and will surely overshadow this microbudget curio in the distribution stakes. But genuine, proudly niche cult status could await \u201cBulk,\u201d the kind of jumbled pizza-dream vision that feels like something stumbled upon in the early hours on some rogue TV station: Even viewers watching from the outset may wonder if they\u2019ve somehow tuned in halfway.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe narrative is more or less beside the point \u2014 or on top of it, below it, above it, floating all around it, given that it unfolds in an multiverse so infinitely fragmented as to make the MCU look tidily linear. In some compartment of it, oligarch tech whiz Anton Chambers (Mark Monero) has conducted a failed experiment in string theory, causing his enigmatic \u201cbrain collider\u201d invention to explode, and Chambers to disappear with it. Dazed journalist Cory Harlan (Sam Riley<\/a>) is kidnapped and enlisted to help retrieve him, with the arch, ultra-poised Aclima (Alexandra Maria Lara) as his identity-shifting warden. <\/p>\n

\n\tIf this is sounding halfway like a Christopher Nolan premise, it\u2019s a deceptively straightforward description of a film that abounds in story tunnels and trapdoors, some metaphorical and some literally built into the outwardly unremarkable suburban house where Harlan is confined. A boxy living room opens into an apocalyptic battlefield; time can loop back on itself or hurtle disorientingly forward. \u201cDon\u2019t question the story out loud, it only undermines it,\u201d Aclima instructs Harlan, and that\u2019s the audience told too. In any event, he and we are assured that while the journey ahead may be complicated, it won\u2019t be long. \u201c90 minutes max,\u201d she says. \u201cAnything longer seems like an indulgence.\u201d (No prizes for guessing the film\u2019s precise running time.)<\/p>\n

\n\tSuch metatextual quips abound in \u201cBulk,\u201d a film that is about nothing so much as its own diverse tapestry of influences, from the handmade whimsy of vintage British TV series \u201cThunderbirds\u201d to the opaquely minimalist sci-fi world-building of Godard\u2019s \u201cAlphaville\u201d to the luridly cranked-up paranoia of midcentury B-movies like \u201cThe Quatermass Experiment.\u201d Wheatley isn\u2019t just briskly checking off reference points, however, but devotedly recreating their tropes and aesthetics. Shot mostly in inky monochrome by his \u201cIn the Earth\u201d DP Nick Gillespie, the film ricochets from sleek, high-contrast noir styling to lovingly artificial back projection to thumbprinted Harryhausen-style model-making \u2014 adding up to a disordered lookbook of genre styles and techniques from the last century or so, over a score heavy on plinky videogame-style synths, eerie bass drops and the occasional flat vocal interjection from Bill Nighy.<\/p>\n

\n\tWith his brow perennially furrowed and hair slicked with sweat, Riley has the exact look and bearing of a suavely addled wrong-man figure from British thrillers of yore \u2014 and thus makes a suitably bemused proxy for the viewers in this wasteland of mounting chaos and absurdity. His real-life wife Lara (reteaming with Riley and Wheatley after 2018\u2019s \u201cHappy New Year, Colin Burstead\u201d) is a wonderfully deadpan counterpart, serenely in control of the madness until an endearing closing-credits gag. All involved appear to have had nearly as much fun making \u201cBulk\u201d as Wheatley himself, which is an entirely reasonable amount; even when the film sinks into the abstruse, it thrives on a sense of mischief and play.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Predicting Ben Wheatley\u2018s next career move is never a game to bet the house on. Two years after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":82168,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49377,34100,49,48,46263,75,337,49378],"class_list":["post-82167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ben-wheatley","tag-bulk","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-edinburgh-film-festival","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-sam-riley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82167\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}