Woodfalls (UK 2013: Dir David Campion)

Elsewhere on this site I reviewed Ben Simpson and David Campion's micro budget film Patrol Men. Campion has just finished a new film, Woodfalls, on which he has sole directing credit having parted ways with Simpson (although the ex-director still retains an original story credit). The film isn't officially released yet. but I got a look at it.

Woodfalls is the story of the Marrs, a travelling family comprising mother, son and daughter, who pitch their caravan on the outskirts of a generic English town, but have difficulty being accepted by its occupants. Billy Marr is nominally the head of the fatherless family, and is torn between his traveller roots - staunchly defended by his mother - and responsibilities, and a need to form friendships with young people of his own age, despite this often leading to confrontations. His sister Beccy is younger but just as innocent as her brother. Billy is gradually introduced to the townsfolk via Bradley, who as a black man shares some of the discrimination Billy faces, but this integration predictably causes tensions with Billy's mother, and arouses the attentions of Becca - who is as keen as her brother to meet other people - with disastrous consequences.

Woodfalls is a definite progression from the ambitious but cash strapped Patrol Men. In focussing its action on a tighter story it succeeds in rising above its slender budget rather than being exposed because of it. The acting is stronger than Campion's previous film too, which allows the viewer to be drawn in to the lives of the Marrs and the town occupants. At little over an hour in running time there's inevitably a compromise in just how much the characters can be developed, but I felt involved enough to care what happened to them.

The film is not without its problems. The character of Wozza, a drug dealer who is all Manc swagger and speed twitchiness, seems to have strayed in from a Shane Meadows film and jars against the more restrained acting of the other cast. I also had some difficulty with the plausibility of the film's nihilistic final scenes.

Matthew Ferdenzi, as Billy, gives a great understated performance as the child/man struggling to integrate into a way of life that he barely understands - Michelle Crane as Becca is even better, exuding a nascent sexuality while at the same time remaining believably teenage, particularly in the scenes where she sneaks out of the caravan to experience club life in the town. The supporting cast are for the most part equally credible, but the real star of the film is Louis Corallo's blissed out photography, which endows both the ubiquitous kebab shacks and chain pubs of the town centre, and the bucolic countryside surrounding it, with a hazy beauty. I was strongly reminded of the films of Andrea Arnold and Lynne Ramsay.

I hope more people get to see Woodfalls. It's a good drama, very slightly let down by an incongruous ending, but which for most of its running time is tense, involving and beautifully shot. It also has a great twitchy dubstep soundtrack which works really well against the visuals.

A Field in England (UK 2013: Dir Ben Wheatley)

Rather like the ragged troupe in A Field in England who walk away from the smoke and skirmishes of the Civil War in search of safer and quieter climes, I've been hiding away waiting for the critical dust to settle following the film's multi platform release before venturing to commit my opinion of it into cyberspace.

And that critical dust has settled broadly into two heaps. One sees the film as visionary, lysergic, woozy and brave. The other heap cries "Emperor's New Clothes!" and derides it as wilfully obscure, pointless and meandering.

It's certainly the case that compared to Wheatley's previous films A Field in England is decidedly non linear in structure, and a more demanding watch. The director has a reputation for playing with genre and creating new from old - crime and witchcraft in Kill List; the characters of a Mike Leigh play remaking The Honeymoon Killers in Sightseers - but this film resists any easy categorisation. It's a giddy mix of Onibaba, Winstanley, Withnail & I, Witchfinder General, and also recalls the increasingly deconstructed narrative of Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio, a film which also offers something complex from an ostensibly simple story.

If you're reading this, chances are you know the story anyway - and if you don't you can read it here. Having watched it three times now, the confusion that greets first viewing about who's who and what they're up to is largely dispelled with familiarity (a friend of mine commented that one of the initial problems is that you're never quite sure how many characters are actually in it, so blurred do their characterisations appear to be). What becomes stronger on subsequent viewings is Amy Jump's script, having a rhythm and cadence which in itself is quite hypnotic, and the strength of the acting. Many have commented on the standout performance of Reece Sheersmith as the whining alchemist's assistant Whitehead, but all the characters are beautifully portrayed, particularly Richard Glover's understated and vulnerable turn as Friend, and the chillingly calculating O'Neill, played by Michael Smiley.

To be honest, I wasn't sure about A Field in England on first viewing. But it really does repay a second visit, although it doesn't become less strange, just more, well, coherent and beautiful - as if you're watching something familiar yet terribly unfamiliar at the same time. If anything, I now find the closest comparison isn't another film, but the artists who record for the Ghost Box record label. Their collective ambition seems to be to musically recast the customs and institutions of this country into something new and strange and to find some magic in the everyday, which is a fairly good summary of why I now love A Field in England.