Ben Wheatley's historical drama "A Field in England," about a group of men wandering the countryside during the English civil war, is at once too little and too much. In the manner of certain bawdy, bloody works of 1960s and 1970s art cinema, not to mention psychedelic midnight flicks from the same era, it's all over the place and often seems to be trying too hard to accomplish goals it can't quite articulate. It seems to be at least partly about the absurdity of entitled royalty and the ingrained cruelty of the class system.
The characters, mostly deserters who've fled either their military obligations or their servitude to a specific master, fall under the dark spell of O'Neil (Michael Smiley), an avowed necromancer who terrorizes the rest into helping him find a buried stash of gold while they're under the influence of hallucinogenic mushrooms.
