Review by Kit Rathenar
I wasn’t sure what to expect from British retro indie horror The Fallow Field, the feature-length debut of director Leigh Dovey, but let me say at once that I ended up being pleasantly surprised by it. Steve Garry stars here as Matt Sadler, a man having a very bad life. When you wake up lying in a field somewhere in Surrey with a week missing from your memory and stagger home only to be dumped by both your missus and your mistress with a mere couple of hours between the two, you’d think life couldn’t get much worse, but Matt’s only at the beginning of the downhill slide. Unconsciously seeking to retrace the steps he took in his missing week, he finds himself wandering through the countryside, where he ends up at a farm run by an old loner named Calham. It quickly becomes clear that he’s in way over his head… and, despite the gaps in Matt’s memories, that this isn’t the first time he’s been caught up in Calham’s psychotic games.
It’s an interesting premise, but the film opens shakily. The opening scenes feel like something from one of those rural soap operas that I remember my older relatives watching in the eighties. The direction is workmanlike with minimal flair, the camerawork, lighting and overall production values are of a quality I can best describe as somewhere between seventies low-budget and classic BBC, and Michael Dacre’s Calham initially presents as the English stereotyping equivalent of calling a character Billy-Bob and having him say “y’all” every fourth word. And for the first third or so of the film, that’s really all we get. The dialogue repeatedly veers into cliche (to the point where I could lipsync some lines word for word despite never having seen the movie before) and there’s a constant sense of frustration that we share with Matt as he tries to work out exactly what the hell is wrong with Calham to make him do the (usual, run-of-the-mill) terrible things he does to innocent passers-by. It all seems very much like we’ve seen it before.
But then, abruptly, it picks up. The plot takes a twist as the unique nature of Calham’s murderous setup is revealed (I won’t spoiler, but it wasn’t what I was expecting and took the film straight out of the purely mundane) and suddenly the story finds its feet and comes to life, in more senses than one. To the point where by the final scenes I was yelling at the screen in excitement, because The Fallow Field managed to give me something that I truly love in horror and a lot of films these days don’t offer me: a hero with a backbone. I grew up on the likes of Nancy from Nightmare on Elm Street, Kirsty from Hellraiser, Ash from Evil Dead – the kind of protagonists who may scream and run when the situation demands it, but are never helpless lambs to the slaughter. And that’s when facing true supernatural evil, at that. I’m nauseated by the modern penchant for merely-human psychos whose sick little schemes are made to seem godlike purely by having the supposed heroes behave like so many lengths of intellectually-challenged wet string. Calham is one of those human psychos; despite having found possibly the ultimate way to get away with his crimes, he is, at heart, still just an overgrown schoolboy sociopath pulling the wings off human flies in the privacy of his own tiny little world. He hasn’t got the stomach for a fair fight, or the self-awareness to cope with anything other than a helpless victim who follows his script to the letter.
And as such, I despised him wholeheartedly – and when he finally pushes Matt too far, I found the consequences not only satisfying but outright inspirational to watch. Steve Garry’s performance as Matt is the highlight of the movie for me, indeed, as he balances the character believably between weakness and strength while keeping him convincingly relatable throughout. Matt isn’t perfect, he’s no square-jawed superman, just a regular guy. But he’s a basically decent human being, with an inner force of will that, you get the impression, surprises even him when he finally discovers it. I never lost my sympathy or liking for him and I actually cared whether he lived or died, and I’ll always give any horror movie props for achieving that.
The Fallow Field probably won’t appeal to everyone. If you do like the aforesaid helplessness-porn school of slasher/psycho movies you may not appreciate the ballsiness it shows in its handling of character, and it’s not a gorehound’s movie simply because it’s oddly shy about showing any significant brutality – fades to black are the order of the day whenever it seems on the verge of going into a torture scene. But if you’re a fan of unsettling, slow-burn, character-driven films as per the likes of The Wicker Man, you might enjoy the damaged, skewed and yet still oddly uplifting sense of humanity that The Fallow Field has to offer. From a faltering start to a great finale, this is a movie that’s worth giving a chance to show its quality.
The Fallow Field is out now on Region 2 DVD, from Monster Pictures.