House Of Pain
HAPPY NEW YEAR, COLIN BURSTEAD Ben Wheatley parties likes it’s 19 minutes to doomsday…
I’d been to see Tom Hiddleston in Coriolanus when we were casting High-Rise, and I was kind of intrigued by it,” says writer/director Ben Wheatley, confirming that the working title of his seventh film, Colin You Anus, did indeed have a Shakespearean ring to it. “I thought I’d do an adaptation set in modern times, but reduce it right down. Instead of armies and battles, you have a family drama.”
And so we have Colin Burstead (Neil Maskell), a man whose fate follows a similar downwards trajectory to that of Coriolanus. They are both blokes who, as Wheatley puts it, “come undone.” For Colin, though, all it takes to pull the thread is a New Year’s party in a rented castle with all of his extended family. Secrets and lies bubble to the surface, and though, for once, Wheatley stops short of plying the blood and piling the bodies, this (un)domestic drama is full of vicious verbals, aggressive lensing, and editing so abrupt it will give viewers blunt force trauma.
Also landing a hefty blow is the Brexit allegory at the heart of the scuffle. “I’d made three films in a row that were period – A Field In England, High-Rise and Free Fire – and I wanted to make something properly contemporary,” says Wheatley. “Well, I don’t think you can make something about now that doesn’t talk about the thing that basically everyone is talking about.”
So the fractured family is a microcosm for the divided country? “Yeah. You can build a human out of a speck of DNA. All the information is there. Happy New Year, Colin Burstead is saying that the country is a person, it’s a family, it’s a town, it’s a county.”