Every time I watch it, I get to a point—normally within the first ten minutes—where I wonder how is it possible that I liked it so much the last I saw it. With the same punctuality, an indefinite stretch further into the film, I always find myself completely enthralled by it.
However paced by a few attractive lines and scraps of dialogue—such as ‘You cannot escape the field, Whitehead! / Then I shall become it! I shall consume all the ill fortune which you are set to unleash! I shall chew up all the selfish scheming and ill intentions that men like you force upon men like me and bury it in the stomach of this place!’—A Field in England doesn’t carry any particularly profound message and doesn’t indulge in pretentious ostentations of auteurism. One of the most intriguing collaborations between Amy Jump and Ben Wheatley to date, it is instead a candid act of cinema whose uneducated instincts happen to feed the most genuine sense of experimentation.
Whereas the prologue is occasionally spoiled by some awkward comedy attempts—like a soldier awakening from apparent death saying, ‘Did someone mention ale?’—the film puts soon itself together replacing the facetious with the witty and the ironic. Even preposterous moments like a character materialising from a post that has been pulled out of the ground through a sort of asymmetric tug of war, seems to find their place in the surreal context.
The entire psychedelic sequence is an intoxicating, if raw, work of visual bravura that relates in my mind to the most clever advice I have ever heard giving. Speaking about the fear of not doing the right thing—or at least not right in the eyes of someone who might have the power to judge it so—Paul Thomas Anderson once said, ‘Just don’t give a fuck, that’s kind of the best thing to do.’ Which is right the spirit A Field in England seems to be fuelled with. Bizarre, flawed, brazen, inspiring.

There is a rare creative lucidity to the defecatory madness of Hard to Be a God. I would be lying if I claimed to have fully grasped its essence, though cogency is hardly a feature the author seems to be after. What clearly reads in his Bruegelian delusion is rather what he once declared, to not be interested in anything but ‘the possibility of building a world, an entire civilisation from scratch.’
Converted from native colour stock to a stunning, silvery b/w that reminded me at times of Ben Wheatley’s digitally photographed A Field in England (coincidentally released the same year), German’s apocalyptic orgy of rot and rain demands a certain degree of cinephile stamina, but not in exchange for nothing. Its exhaustingly slow pace and murky narrative convey a palpable sense of stillness, anguish, and oppression, that are likely meant to evoke Stalinist Russia’s dereliction while stirring broader reflections on human nature.
The camerawork is enthralling. Crisp spherical lenses wander throughout the delirious carnival seamlessly shifting in and out of POVs, often framed by bizarre objects in the foreground to an alienating effect. Characters emerge from behind the camera à la Klaus Kinski in Herzog’s Aguirre, occasionally staring straight at us, delivering random lines or lovely guttural grunts.
However arcane and strenuous, Hard to Be a God is the monumental work of a master. It left me singularly fascinated, inspired, and eager to take a long, warm shower.