Director: Ben Wheatley
Screenplay: Ben Wheatley
Starring: Sam Riley, Alexandra Maria Lara, Noah Taylor, Mark Monero
Year: 2025
Country: UK
BBFC Certification: 15
Duration: 90 mins
BULK is the new mind trip from British director Ben Wheatley. The story is somewhat difficult to convey to anyone that hasn’t seen it but I shall attempt to do my best.
Reality as we know has been ripped apart by a failed science experiment carried out by billionaire turtleneck wearing tech whiz Anton Chambers (Mark Monero) and subsequently disappeared.
We follow journalist Cory Harland (Sam Riley) as he is kidnapped and taken to ‘The House’ a location that now exists as a reception room of sorts before entering the tangled mess that reality has become. He is helped and sometimes thwarted by the identity shifting scientist/resistance fighter Aclima (Alexandra Maria Lara) and chauffeur/cop/wise man of the desert Sessler (Noah Taylor) as he attempts to find Anton.
That is a straightforward look at a film that purposely keeps you in the dark about the true nature of the experiment and we learn only fragmented bits by the time the film has finished. However for me these all work in its favour. If you’ve had to sit through even a few of the recent MCU films and their mishandling of multiverse then this is the antidote. This is pure noirish pulp sci-fi goodness.
This is also a very freeing experience from a director who has recently worked on mega blockbusters like ‘Meg 2: The Trench’ and Netflix’s ‘Rebecca’ adaption. In the post screening Q&A he said that he wanted to impose some restrictions on this project, taking ‘Eraserhead’ as an inspiration, and setting and filming pretty much in a single location. He also was inspired by the recent Disney+ series about the creation of ILM and thought that he could probably buy most of that equipment on Amazon now and so bought lots of Airfix kits and started building all the vehicles and backgrounds that appear in the film. At times these effects feel completely real and other times he purposely leans into the DIY nature of their creation like the papier-mâché guns and Corgi Land Rovers.
There are so many influences that fed into this project that Ben Wheatley fills about 3 pages with them during the hand drawn credits. For me aside from the clear evidence of ‘Alphaville’, ’70s Doctor Who’, and ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’ I really loved the black and white photography that reminded me of ‘Seconds’ by John Frankenheimer. Sam Riley has the same queasy melancholic energy of Rock Hudson’s Tony while also possessing possibly one of the most exciting and goosebump inducing voices I’ve ever heard.
BULK is currently on a nationwide tour and I cannot urge you hard enough to seek it out if you can because seeing films like this on the big screen are sadly few and far between.