The Field is a 2019 mystery about a long-empty farmstead that holds the key to secret worlds.
From Chicago, young couple Ben Holland (Tim Higgins) and Lydia (Kara Mulrooney) buy a quaint old farmhouse in the country, their dream come true. He’s an aspiring amateur photographer, and takes a few pictures of them out in the back field, but when he downloads them into his computer, discovers some strange images haunting the backgrounds, that of blurry figures walking past them that he didn’t see while they were actually there. But that’s just the beginning, as it turns out plenty of secrets surround the old Dondlinger Farm, leaving Ben and Lydia trying to figure out what they’ve got themselves into and how now to get out of it.
Directed and co-written by Tate Bunker, The Field is a low key affair, filmed with barely any budget or production value, tempering what could have been a pretty decent little thriller. While the setup has more than enough familiar about it, with a musty old house chock full of creepy knick knacks and hints of the occult dating back forty some years, it’s very loosely stitched together in giving it any sense of place or impact, Bunker using all kinds of low grade visual effects (hyper lens flares, saturated colors, lots of blurriness, slow-motion and more) to try and trick us into thinking this is more scary or compelling than it really is.
Further in the mix are Barry Bostwick (who is no stranger to oddball movies) as a local art gallery type and Veronica Cartwright as an older woman touched by the past wandering around speaking in broken English as the townsfolk seem angered by Ben and Lydia’s presence. Either way, what we end up with is a strange story of flashbacks and misdirection where we’re never really drawn into the weirdness, nothing about Ben or Lydia all that believable, especially considering what they uncover … not to mention the various quirky characters they run into in town.
What this does is leave the film in a sort of unsatisfying limbo. Is it a horror movie? A black comedy? A puzzler? It’s hard to tell. It’s never for a moment frightful, even as it works for some jumpscare tension. Higgins himself is to blame for losing some of that traction as he plays it well off the mark Mulrooney lands on, but most of it falls at the feet of Bunker, who can’t manage to raise any proper interest in this, even with a curious hook at the start involving young lovers. Sure, it gets a bit more intriguing the more it lingers on as the impact of what’s happening in the farm yard’s back field reveals more of its secrets but even as it reaches for an emotional thump, stumbles in making it stick. There’s certainly ambition in the filmmaker’s efforts, but The Field lacks all the wonder and awe it aims for.