Michael Smiley

Irish legends are rich with horrifying monsters, painful realities and a genuine sense of despair. Perhaps rooted in the Irish struggle, many of the lessons from their myths evoke inequality and injustice – it does not matter who you are, what you believe or what you do, you are not above nature’s law. What is nature’s law? It is a perverse combination of God’s will and an amoral natural world. Set in the mostly undisturbed forests of Ireland, The Hallow is about a conservationist (Joseph Mawle) and his young family. Despite many warnings from the locals, he persists in investigating the forests, eventually inspiring its wrath.

The increasingly prolific Ben Wheatley returns to screens a little under a year since his gallows-humour effigy Sightseers. Like a talent possessed, he seems like a filmmaker anxious to capitalise on his growing cult recognition and harness larger and more challenging material, a successful strategy that has give him a growing fanbase on both sides of the pond.

Rather surprisingly given its small budget and lack of household, or in some cases even recognizable names, Ben Wheatley’s Kill List made quite a critical splash when it was released two years ago. The follow up to his rather porous debut Down Terrace, the story of two hitmen, three targets and an escalation from moody …

A Field in England Directed by Ben Wheatley Written by Amy Jump UK, 2013 Since his impressive debut Down Terrace (2009), Ben Wheatley has managed to establish himself as one of the most promising young directors in the UK today. The black and white (English) civil war-era A Field in England is both delightfully eccentric and …