Discovered I had A field in England tucked away on my little server so I watched it again this morning. Considering that apart from a (very) brief appearance by Julian Barratt playing a character who is quickly speared and then shot, the entire cast is 5 men and 1 field, it's a fucking amazing little film.
I've read a fair bit about the influences, but I wonder if either Wheatley or the writer Sarah Jupp had read Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which predates this by a few years. Although the film and Clarke's book are set in widely different times, they both have a sense that magic was an oddly domestic thing, almost normal.
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
One of the more interesting concepts in the film is stuff that [presumably] is going on out of view -- the pitched battle happening over the hedge, whatever the alchemist is doing inside the little white tent.
Amazing.
“Badge, gun, holster, skateboard … meet Canada's first skateboarding cop”
That's true. Usually when a production goes for very 'spare' effects - it fails. Here we had some not-very-big pyrotechnics, a bit of smoke, and a soundtrack of cries. All of this was set against, or behind, an odd old-fashioned style of overgrown hedge. The result was bizarre. I never for a moment doubted that the cast was at risk from a battle somewhere. At the same time it all happened in a world strangely disconnected from them, behind the hedge. Very nicely done.
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
The cultural predecessors are O.L.D. telly productions: Penda's Fen (especially) and Robin Redbreast, plus arguably A Photograph. I'm resolutely pushing British Eerie as the collective term of choice.
"We all have flaws, and mine is being wicked." James Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks 1951