107 min | R | April 16, 2021 | Neon
A scientist treks into the English woods to find a colleague during a pandemic. The forest has other plans, and the people living in it have already surrendered to them. Ben Wheatley turns a few actors and a patch of trees into a strobing fever dream.
Dr. Martin Lowery hikes into an English forest to reach a remote research station during a pandemic. A park scout named Alma guides him through a wood that locals fear. The film is a folk-horror about the forest as an organism with a will. Ben Wheatley uses the trappings of a sickness lockdown to build a story about contagion of a different kind. What spreads here is belief, and the woods reward it.
Joel Fry plays Martin as a soft, unprepared man whose body fails before his mind does. He registers an injured foot and creeping infection with a wince that turns the back half into endurance. Ellora Torchia plays Alma with practical competence that erodes as the rituals close in around her. Reece Shearsmith plays Zach, a survivalist living alone in the trees, with a placid menace that makes his cruelty feel reasonable to him. Hayley Squires plays Dr. Olivia Wendle as a scientist whose equipment and her mysticism point at the same conclusion.
Wheatley writes and directs, and his attack on the senses defines the picture. He scores the forest with synth drones and renders the rituals as strobing montages of split-second frames. The strobe sequences fracture the image until the viewer cannot parse a face from a tree. Sound design layers radio static, chanting, and the hum of generators into a single oppressive texture. The lo-fi craft turns a few actors and a patch of woods into something genuinely disorienting.
The film commits to its premise and refuses to translate the forest into a tidy explanation. Science and superstition collapse into each other, and Wheatley treats both as equally helpless before the thing in the ground. The final act trades story for sensation and stays abstract past the point of patience. The middle, where two ordinary people fall into the orbit of two true believers, is where the dread takes hold. The forest does not need to be understood. It only needs you to keep walking into it.