Director Ben Wheatley has gained ꦯa well-deserved rep for thinking o꧅utside the box.

(2011)👍 kicked off as a one-last-job crime thriller and wound up in the depths of metaphysical horror. Last year’s crossed nerds-in-love comedy with a killer-couple road movie.

But with A Field In England Wheatley and his regular writing partner (and wife) Amy Jump aren’t just outside the box – they’ve erupted way out of the💛 st♕orage depot.

Just off screen the English Civil War is ꦯꦛraging. Shots, explosions, smoke, shouts, screams.

A man, Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith), scrambles clear of the hellish melee, soon followed by two others who have likewise had their bellyful of fighting. A fourth man shows up and says heౠ knows of a good in✱n nearby.

But it’s not an alehouse he leads them to – it’s a broad field surrounded by a ♏mystic ring of mushrooms where an armed ꧙man with an Irish accent and a commanding air tells them a great treasure is buried.

Pretty soon Whitehead is roped, bewitched and🅰 used as a human metal detector, while his fellow-deserters are set to digging at gunpoinꦅt. Sounds weird? Oh, it gets a whole lot weirder.

Before long we have runestones, magic-mushroom visions, much talk of alchem🌃y and stolen manuscripts; there’s a black mirror that becomes an earth-engulfing planet and a man who’s shot dead, resurrected and killed again.

All shot in moody, portentous bl꧟ack-and-white widescreen, bleak and beautiful, while Jim W🌟illiams’ nervy, percussive score deepens the sense of nameless foreboding.

Does it work? ⭕For the mo🌺st part, yes; though at times you may feel you’re being fed obscurity for obscurity’s sake.

It could be that Wheatley’s outpaced his audience ♔this time around.

And for a film that’s wrong-footed us𝓰 so often and so deviously, it seems a shame that it culminates in a rather too predictable shoot-out.

But one thing’s for sure: bracingly bold and (surely) inimitable, A Field In England is like no other movie you’ve ever seen.