Watching a Ben Wheatley film can be a wonderfully disorienting experience. Wheatley enjoys getting under his audience’s skin: he lives to make us uncomfortable and delights in showing us images that may make us lose our lunch. The characters in his films are bedraggled hitmen, schmucky mobsters, bloodthirsty lovers, and downtrodden, ordinary folks who are often one awful day away from regressing to a state of complete lunacy. Wheatley’s movies leave you aghast at their ingenuity and sadism and mischief, to the point where he’s become one of the most consistently unpredictable genre directors working today; certainly, no secret why the likes of Edgar Wright and Martin Scorsese count themselves as fans.
Although there’s no mistaking one of Wheatley’s films for anyone else’s, the Essex-born filmmaker seems committed to doing things a bit differently every time he sets out to direct something. Wheatley seems allergic to the act of repetition, which is why the idea of him remaking Alfred Hitchcock’s sensuous Gothic classic “Rebecca” is at once genuinely surprising and also not surprising in the slightest.
The truth is that we expect these kinds of curveballs from a director like Ben Wheatley: the only constant in each film he makes is that whatever he cooks up will not resemble what came before. With only eight films under his belt, and a style that bridges the gap from the arthouse to the grindhouse, Wheatley, at this point in his career, could be considered a bonafide auteur – which, if you’ve seen one of his movies, is both awesome, and also a little terrifying.
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Since “Rebecca” will be landing on Netflix soon, we wanted to take a look back at Wheatley’s filmography, beginning with the inauspicious “Down Terrace,” all the way up to this year’s starry adaptation of one of Daphne du Maurier’s most lasting literary works. Given Wheatley’s track record, this is one of those lists we may have to update in about five years. Who knows what fresh madness he’ll cook up between now and then?
“Down Terrace” (2009)
Those of us who consider themselves major Ben Wheatley fans would argue that his serrated, sadistic debut, “Down Terrace,” is actually more fun to watch once you’ve digested the better, more fleshed-out films in his filmography. For Wheatley-philes, “Down Terrace” provides an adequate starting point, laying the groundwork for many of the motifs and obsessions that he would go on to explore in more satisfying detail later in his career. That said, the film feels lumpy and just a little unfocused when compared to the razor-sharp likes of “Kill List,” or even more conceptually ambitious outliers like “High-Rise.” Wheatley’s debut is also one of his most deceptively straightforward films. It’s essentially a very dark father/son story, focused on a contemptuous British crook and his good-for-nothing adult son as they struggle to maintain control of their small-potatoes underworld empire while weeding out a possible informant in their midst. The tone of “Down Terrace” suggests the jittery naturalism of John Cassavetes infused with a nasty, gallows British edge, and the film is a fascinating embryonic document when you consider where Wheatley would go in subsequent years. In that regard, the film almost feels like Ben Wheatley’s version of “Bottle Rocket.” However, while “Down Terrace” is fascinating within the very singular context of this director’s filmography, it’s probably Wheatley’s least-engaging movie on a whole and suffers from some tonal and pacing issues that bog down an otherwise amusingly low-key crime saga. That said, all great filmmakers have to start somewhere, and “Down Terrace,” while uneven at times, is still a veritable battle cry of a debut.
“Kill List” (2011)
If nothing else, “Kill List” offers more than enough viscera-soaked proof to cement Ben Wheatley as one of the great midnight moviemakers of his generation. “Kill List” is a delectable feast of depravity, gore, and occult-grindhouse movie madness that’s best viewed in the godless hours of the night, and with a crowd that has no idea what they’re in for. Wheatley’s strongest film to date centers around two supremely disaffected British blokes: a pair of ex-soldiers who live in the suburbs, struggle with money and marital issues, and make a living carrying out incredibly grisly murders-for-hire. The early scenes simmer with intrigue, as Wheatley colors moments of Mike Leigh-esque kitchen-sink realism with portents that something more ominous is afoot. The assignment our two protagonists receive when the film begins in earnest sees them crossing a number of names off a “kill list,” a catalog that includes a priest, a disturbed loner who traffics in torture and snuff videos, and, in an inspired touch, a member of Parliament. “Kill List” takes a hard left turn into “The Wicker Man” territory in its relentlessly ferocious and surreal home stretch, culminating in an anything-goes climax that concludes with one of the most heartless final shots in cinematic memory. “Kill List” is certainly not for the squeamish – any movie where a man is bludgeoned to death with a department store hammer could never, ever be described as light viewing – but it’s also a deviously clever and shockingly assured sophomore feature that showcases this director’s enviable talent for mixing and matching genres to his own wicked end.
“Sightseers” (2012)
“Sightseers” definitely makes for an interesting elevator pitch: picture a standard, if darker-than-usual lover’s honeymoon comedy, only the lovers in question are comprised of a passive female pushover and a vicious male psycho for whom every conversation, no matter how innocent it might be at the outset, ends in murder. This is nothing if not a memorably macabre conceit, but thankfully, Wheatley proved to mostly be up to the challenge with this much sillier, still pitch-black follow-up to the nightmarish “Kill List.” If anything, “Sightseers” posits Wheatley as a kind of dark prankster successor to the British pop cinema of fellow genre revisionist Edgar Wright; which is just as well, since Wright has an E.P. credit on this film, and one of the film’s stars is Steve Oram, who would go on to secure a small but memorable role in Wright’s “The World’s End.” Here, Oram plays Chris, a surface-level charming homicidal lunatic who loves his caravan and his girlfriend Tina (Alice Lowe) and despises just about everyone and everything else. “Sightseers” has some gruesome fun at the expense of Chris and Tina’s many victims (“he’s not a person, he’s a Daily Mail reader” is a particularly merciless rationalization for executing some in cold blood), but it’s still slightly less confident than “Kill List,” and ultimately feels like a stylish example of a brilliant artist treading water as opposed to exploring uncharted terrain. That said, “Sightseers” is a favorite among some Wheatley die-hards, and for good reason: it’s a barbed, bilious, and very funny anti-romance about two utterly loathsome and despicable pieces of shit.
“A Field In England” (2013)
Few films have managed to accurately depict the fever that comes with a psilocybin mushroom high, but for all its maniacal detours, “A Field In England” does capture the psychedelic delirium of a drug buzz like few other films we can think of. Wheatley’s fourth film is, for lack of a more eloquent description, completely off-the-wall: a woolly hallucinogenic brain-tease about a band of disheveled 17th-century drifters (a group that includes an alchemist, a commander, and two military deserters) who ingest a bad batch of ‘shrooms and surrender to a terrifying trip with the bloody English Civil War as their constantly-mutating backdrop. In terms of story and structure, “Field” feels like one of Wheatley’s shaggiest, least-disciplined works, which will make the film a tough viewing experience for some. However, as a piece of pure style, “A Field In England” is a showstopper: a feature-length bad dream that’s both sinister and transfixing, filmed in evocative black and white and imbued with Wheatley’s insistently perverse sense of humor. As an allegory for man struggling against his inherently savage nature, “A Field in England” is, at times, defiantly alienating, funneling the existential wartime torpor of “Apocalypse Now” through the batty, anything-goes lens of early George Miller or Peter Weir (it should also be mentioned that Martin Scorsese, a vocal fan of Wheatley’s, lent his name to this film to boost its pedigree). We would never recommend “A Field In England” as anyone’s first Ben Wheatley movie, but the film is a decent enough litmus test to determine whether or not this director’s unapologetically left-of-center touch is for you.
“High-Rise” (2015)
The phantasmagoric literary ecosystems of author J.G. Ballard present a daunting challenge to any filmmaker who aspires to helm a cinematic adaptation. In books like ‘The Atrocity Exhibition” and “The Drowned World,” Ballard forces us to confront the un-confrontable, and his insights into humanity’s boundless capacity for self-destruction remain penetrating even decades after the publication of his most acclaimed work. “High-Rise” is Ballard’s bitterly bemused dystopian parable for a world gone mad: a sulfuric satirical howl from the gutters of Thatcher-era London that’s also the story of an elite high-rise tower that descends into barbarity, madness, and, ultimately, upheaval and class warfare. As a director, Wheatley enjoys sequestering violent, shortsighted characters in cloistered environments and watching how they claw at each other before giving into their basest, most animalistic instincts.“High-Rise,” then, might be the most upfront manifestation of Wheatley’s pessimistic worldview: this is a movie that opens with the scene in which a poor dog is barbecued, and only gets more cruel from there on out. There’s an argument to be made that Wheatley gets closer than Steven Spielberg, although perhaps not “Crash” director David Cronenberg, in terms of nailing the rancorous tone of Ballard’s very specific literary voice, and it should be mentioned that “High-Rise” marks the director’s first attempt at working with big marquee actors (Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Elisabeth Moss), a process that would continue into his next film.