Ben Wheatley's pandemic-created movie is a slow-burn creepy eco-thriller, starring Joel Fry as a soil scientist going deep into the woods with a local guide (Ellora Torchia) to investigate a missing colleague and linked to researching nature's 'neural network' and ancient folklore. As they encounter a strange man (Reece Shearsmith) living in isolation, reality and metaphor blur, the situation rapidly becomes very unstable and desperate for the pair as the different narrative elements collide. Perhaps closest to his A Field In England in style at times, Wheatley does a good job of presenting nature as a quietly creeping invasive force, but the unfolding mysteries are quite thinly drawn and the performances are adequate at best, and the link between the pandemic backdrop in the movie and the environmental aspect is awkward, yet the hallucinatory attempts to ambitiously establish communication between man and nature is constructed effectively, even if it all leaves the viewer somewhat flummoxed by the end of it all.
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