Many – myself included – were thrown through a bit of a loop when Brit golden boy Ben Wheatley presented his 2013 fourth feature, A Field in England, to an unsuspecting and sober public. Film critics tend to favour cosy narratives when it comes to generalising about the careers of the artists that they love, and following a trio of copper-bottomed bangers in Down Terrace (2009), Kill List (2011) and Sightseers (2012), Field upset the apple cart and then some. Yet with a longer view, it’s a film that anticipates an important side to Wheatley as an artist and creator, a desire to wantonly reject conformity and the rules of the industry game to create pure, personal oddities that you can either run with or reject outright. Either route is okay.
Bulk doubles down on the cheeky, audience-baiting impulses of A Field in England, yet makes more sense as a project with a wider view of Wheatley’s punk-eclectic filmography. In fact, “audience-baiting” feels like a disingenuous term in this context, as there’s definitely the sense that these films have been made in earnest rather than as cinematic rug-pulls aimed at the crazy top 1 per cent of Wheatley fandom. Recalling works such as Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville and Orson Welles’ The Trial, Bulk is a self-unravelling noir sci-fi which gleefully ties its various threads into impressive granny knots of self-referrential absurdity.
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The film stars Sam Riley as Corey Harlan, a slick, throw-back journo kidnapped and drugged with “heavy metal” by Noah Taylor’s weedling minion Sessler. He’s tossed into what looks like the living room of a suburban semi where he meets Aclima (Alexandra Maria Lara, Riley’s old co-star from Anton Corbijn’s Joy Division bio, Control) who becomes his guide through the nine-sided mess of a reality that constantly shifts beneath the players’ feet.
Sessler stands in for the entire supporting cast (cops, transients, sages…), while Aclima exudes a mischievous confidence that suggests she understands everything that’s going on here, and so should you. Corey, meanwhile, tends to have to express a thousand shades of WFT as he executes an oblique mission to destroy a Big Brother-like tech baron called Anton Chambers (Mark Monero). All the performances are very game, and everyone clearly understand’s why they’re here and what the film is.
As Corey does, you have to allow much of Bulk to wash over you and focus instead on the detail. Wheatley whisks action sequences out of quickie green screen fixes and half-done Airfix models of planes, cars and trains. The makeshift quality is all part of the film’s impulsive charm, costumes giving a big dressing-up-box energy and guns made from fat wodges of cardboard and Sharpie detailing. There’s a trend in a lot of low-budget British cinema at the moment where young filmmakers are only allowed to tell their story if they can do so in a single location, and Bulk feels like a meta-commentary on a circumstance that can be confining for some and freeing for others.
As evident from the above description, Bulk is Wheatley’s ultimate “not for everyone” offering, and as such he is taking the film on a personal tour of British fleapits to present this miniature mind-expander to a hardcore few. The film doesn’t offer any clear revelations or insights, but it’s a fun piece of homemade cinema that definitely doesn’t outstay its welcome.
