Ben Wheat­ley con­jures wood­land insan­i­ty in the In the Earth trailer

The wheels of progress tend to turn slow­ly in the film world, but Ben Wheat­ley is liv­ing proof that they don’t have to. The writer/​director whipped up his lat­est fea­ture in record time, from a two-week shoot back in August dur­ing the thick of the pan­dem­ic, through a swift edit, on to a pre­mière back at the vir­tu­al Sun­dance in Jan­u­ary, and now a fast approach­ing release date next month.

Today brings the first trail­er for In the Earth, an expect­ed­ly sparse but also no-less-expect­ed­ly ter­ri­fy­ing vision of hor­ror set among the woods of Eng­land. Wheat­ley intend­ed his film as a com­men­tary on the COVID-19 virus rag­ing all around him at the time, and the shots of haz­mat-suit­ed fig­ures sur­round­ed by death cer­tain­ly ticks that box.

The plot remains fuzzy sure­ly by design, but what’s known is that a research expe­di­tion ven­tured into these forests and didn’t come out, beck­on­ing to mind some Anni­hi­la­tion-esque abstract men­ace in the air swirling around this seclud­ed pock­et of nature far from civ­i­liza­tion. Their search for a cure to a world­wide sick­ness brings them far­ther and far­ther from real­i­ty, as grav­i­ty unrav­els and the world sur­round­ing them comes undone.

Our own Han­nah Wood­head had plen­ty of pos­i­tive things to say about Wheatley’s ​“return to the days of Kill List and A Field in Eng­land”. She described the film as ​“a wel­come dose of mind-bend­ing weird­ness,” and ​“an eco­log­i­cal night­mare, draw­ing on Wheatley’s inter­est in cults, ​‘British­ness’ as a phe­nom­e­non, and… psy­che­del­ic mush­rooms.” Promis­ing stuff.

After the all-around let­down of Wheatley’s take on Rebec­ca for Net­flix last fall, it’s heart­en­ing to see him return to the realm of hec­tic psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tor­tion he calls his stomp­ing ground. At least for Amer­i­cans, it’ll be an ide­al accom­pa­ni­ment to the blos­som­ing of spring­time, and a sea­son that’ll hope­ful­ly see audi­ences return­ing to the­aters as safe­ly as possible.

In the Earth comes to the­aters in the US on 23 April, and then the UK on 18 June.