An Exhausting Exercise in Falling Back in Love with Movies

None of us are ever too old to stop learning.

Even if you’re a filmmaker whose work is nearing a respectable dozen features, even when you’ve had a Hollywood paycheck and brought your indie spirit into the big leagues, there’s still plenty to discover. That’s an ethos idiosyncratic British director Ben Wheatley has carried with him once he reached international success; his earlier kitchen-sink fare launched him into Netflix deals and profitable East-meets-West action sequels, and despite all odds, he remained true to his vision.

Throughout his recent money-making period, he’s operated on a one-for-them, one-for-me work ethic, following his glossy Rebecca adaptation with micro-budget folk-horror In the Earth, and now boldly succeeding Jason Statham shark vehicle Meg 2: The Trench with Bulk, a passionate, scrappy homemade sci-fi that acts as a new course of film school for Wheatley, taking him back to basics after having the world at his fingers.

The anchor of Wheatley’s high-concept, low-fidelity brain-blender is Sam Riley’s crumpled amnesiac Corey Harlan, who groggily wakes in the back of a car driving hell-for-leather through the night by the brusque and irritable Karl Sessler (Noah Taylor, now a dead-ringer for his fellow Aussie Nick Cave). They arrive at an ordinary-looking suburban house, greeted by syringe-happy scientist Aclima Benton (Riley’s real-life wife Alexandra Maria Lara), who pumps Harlan’s veins full of heavy metals and sends him into a multiversal, interdimensional adventure to undo the destructive experiments of the mysterious Anton Chambers (a suitably imperious Mark Monero). Harlan’s recollections of the past (and future) begin to come back as he’s pushed from war-torn wasteland to jerry-rigged particle accelerator, and the audience has no choice but to cling on for dear life as science and fiction begin to split apart before their very eyes.

Bulk as a title often feels like a statement of intent, a blunt and brief word monolithic in its phonetics and definition. To say Bulk is, well, bulky is accurate, because this is a whole lot of movie from a creative keen to rediscover his love of all things pop culture.

Marrying the acerbic stylings of Jean-Luc Godard with the type of adventure taken by Jean-Luc Picard, there has rarely been an explosion of genre ideas quite like this, delivered at such an aggressive pace that there’s the very real possibility that your grey matter will overheat and shut down very quickly. There’s a gag early on about the difference between ‘brain’ and ‘brane’, the latter of which is (apparently) the unstable cause of all the film’s chaos, and the explanation is swift and flippant. Didn’t catch it? Tough! There’s plenty more mumbo-jumbo where that came from!

The main problem boils down to just how much Wheatley is throwing out here. There are big stretches of kitsch amusement where giant action chase sequences become hilariously naff green-screen showdowns between toy cars and souped-up Airfix models, harkening back to the handmade charm of Ray Harryhausen or black-and-white Doctor Who. Here, you can feel Wheatley’s child-like excitement for being able to do this sort of thing without supervision; it’s obvious that helming a weightless $120 million creature feature gave him cause to plaster the tagline ‘NARRATIVE IS TYRANNY’ over the poster of his next film.

He really does take that to heart, maybe, unfortunately, too much. With a fast-talking script that wields string theory in one hand and slapstick in the other, the connective tissue from moment to moment is practically nonexistent, submerging his audience in unmoored style that can feel charmingly cheap in places and unintentionally lazy in others.

Whenever the story gets back to the unassuming housing estate, the mood dips, with each interior blandly painted white with the only sights of interest being a Pollock-esque freakout wallpiece created by Wheatley himself; this version of a world-between-worlds runs the real risk of looking like a student film that didn’t know how to get its screenplay over the line, and very frequently falls foul of its self-imposed limitations.

Using GoPros, SVHS cameras, camcorders and iPhones for extra coverage, the film’s visual language is extremely colloquial, and attuning your ears and eyes to just what it’s doing at any given moment is a Herculean task. Possibly enjoying this experience under the influence of some fun substances might make it all click and sharpen the deadpan humour of Bill Nighy’s narration, interrupting the action and adding ellipses to the budgetary corner-cutting necessary for a story this big being told with this little money.

Wheatley admittedly knows it’s all a joke; one character comes back after a brief hiatus from the narrative, dryly quipping “I’ve been on a side mission: it was very action-based and hectic.” “I would’ve liked to have seen that!” their scene partner and the audience reply in unison, yet winking about its blindspots doesn’t entirely absolve Bulk of being a mostly frustrating experience.

The performers, all Wheatley regulars, do their amicable best with the funky writing, with Riley in particular playing hard into the half-smoked human cigarette image he’s curated since his breakout turn in Control. Noah Taylor is afforded the role with most to do, having plenty of fun with ludicrous outfits and beards as infinite versions of his character, and Mark Monero’s smug evil genius does fine work at the narrative’s peripheral regions.

One has to pour one out for Alexandra Maria Lara and the many tomes of science theory she likely had to read to make head or tail of what she’s saying, and her elusive femme fatale is far and away the character with the heaviest load; chewing over dialogue that even Christopher Nolan would consider simplifying can’t have been easy.

Wheatley also chooses to re-record almost all of his audio, putting his loyal colleagues through an intense ADR experience where the arch performances have to be delivered all over again. He’s no stranger to this; his similarly small-scale A Field in England spends most of its third act doing the same, but doing this for a whole 90 minutes is a colossal endeavour, and unfortunately not one that bears good fruit. The result is intentionally stilted and annoyingly distancing, upping the artifice from beginning to end and sanding off anything that threatens to become vérité.

In a film career filled with so many digressions over a short 15 years, Wheatley’s greatest strength has always been collaboration. Whether that’s handing over an additional writing credit to the cast of Kill List, working with his spouse/co-writer Amy Jump or working from another’s screenplay entirely (Sightseers, written by its stars Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, remains his funniest film), Wheatley’s harnessing of different people’s energies was the thing that made him a star.

Now, with his own fingerprints over everything, from the janky score to the detailed miniatures to the hand-scribbled credits, we are granted the ultimate Ben Wheatley experience, warts and all. Clearly, his cup runneth over with adoration for the act of making; this is his first attempt at music, and a growing enthusiasm for comic-book writing (he has a 2000 AD Judge Dredd collaboration incoming) has given him the drive to make something THIS dense and packed with ideas.

As human beings, we should be happy he’s still so in love with his game, and is doing so much to further his craft. As audience members, it’s just very hard to love it in the same way.

The film is currently engaged on the Narrative Is Tyranny tour throughout UK/Ireland. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes.