After garnering acclaim for his early folk horrors, Ben Wheatley has struggled to reach those heights again. One possible explanation is the input of Amy Jump as co-writer and editor of all his films until Free Fire. Since then, Wheatley’s solo work has felt much looser, whether it is the chaotic character drama of Happy New Year, Colin Burstead or his shambolic though entertaining take on zombies in Generation Z. This tone seems to best reflect Wheatley’s instincts with his new film, Bulk, demonstrating this sensibility at its most extreme.
It’s a cliché to talk about a filmmaker going ‘back to basics’, but there is no other way to describe Bulk, which leans into its rough and cheap looking aesthetic while exploring massive concepts befitting a filmmaker of Wheatley’s experience. Sam Riley stars as Cory Harlan, who has been drugged and dragged to a house where he is given cryptic instructions by two strangers that he’s expected to follow before time runs out – how long he has and the consequences of failing are not explained. After this set-up, the rest of the film can be most concisely described as a noir, conspiracy thriller, sci-fi mash up. References are made to an explosion that has led to the confusing world Harlan finds himself in, which is represented by a film with less of a plot than a series of sketches in the manner of Wheatley’s early work on the sketch show The Wrong Door.
The result is a film that explains too much and says too little, throwing ideas and images at you with no expectation to put it together into a coherent image.
FOR MORE ON BULK CLICK ON THE ‘POSTER’ AT THE BOTTOM OF THE REVIEW
A Wheatley film almost entirely in black and white with a pulsating soundtrack sounds similar to his previously most experimental film A Field in England, but the closest resemblance Bulk has to Wheatley’s previous work is when he directed the first two episodes of Peter Capaldi’s era of Doctor Who, though Bulk more specifically feels like the ‘classic’ Who of the seventies. It’s a deluge of ideas held together by sheer weirdness and unpredictability but even in terms of aesthetics, it feels strangely old-fashioned. Front projection and post-synched dialogue is used throughout, with one moment feeling like a reconstruction of a missing episode. The premise itself of a house where each room takes you to a new dimension feels like a Doctor Who premise or a nightmarish version of the TARDIS.
This may already sound wearying to some and while I was charmed by the lo-fi sci-fi elements, what tipped the balance for me is the overabundance of metafictional commentary. A cynical mind could interpret this film as Wheatley firmly rebelling against Hollywood studio filmmaking that he has experienced in the past by savagely deconstructing storytelling conventions. Harlan’s experience is at one point explained as a ‘narrative based learning experience’ that has become broken. There are many on the nose lines highlighting the artificiality of the film such as ‘There’s some complicated lore there but it’s not worth going into’ and ‘Don’t question the story out loud. It undermines it.’ Harlan’s journey through ‘a reality full of clues to tell you it’s a construct’ is meant to mirror ours as an audience, but it doesn’t make it any less exhausting being constantly told that none of this is real.
The intention behind Bulk reveals itself in its end credits, handwritten by Wheatley and peppered with behind the scenes information, highlighting that this is a project made purely on passion and instinct. The result is a film that explains too much and says too little, throwing ideas and images at you with no expectation to put it together into a coherent image. This approach is most clear in the use of Bill Nighy’s intruding voiceover that feels authoritative but is often disconnected to what is happening onscreen. While hardly going to make anyone a convert to Wheatley’s shaggy dog style, there’s so much in Bulk that there’s plenty to enjoy, especially if you accept what it’s giving you and let yourself go along for the ride.
BULK PLAYED AT THE IMAGINE FANTASTIC FILM FESTIVAL (IN AMSTERDAM) 2025
