A Field in England

During a Civil War battle, a group of men flee across a field, fall in with an alchemist searching for buried treasure, eat something in a stew, and descend into a shared psychosis in which the field itself becomes a place of ritual and torment.

Ben Wheatley made his most experimental film for almost nothing, in stark black and white, and it is closer to a bad trip than a narrative: strobing montages, a man emerging screaming from a tent on a rope, and a genuine sense of the occult breaking through the mud.

It was released simultaneously in cinemas, on television, on disc and on streaming, a British first, which got more attention than the film.

It is not for everybody and it is genuinely hypnotic if you let it work, and the folk-horror revival owes it a great deal.

Michael Smiley is the alchemist and the standout.