Review: Bulk

Director:  Ben Wheatley

Stars:  Sam Riley, Alexandra Maria Lara, Mark Monero

Industrious UK filmmaker Ben Wheatley has been writing for 2000 AD of late, and the emphasis on visual storytelling involved in comics helped spur this return to brain-frying British science fiction; a deliberately lo-fi and scrappy bit of speculative fiction that the director is touring around some of the country’s choice indie cinemas before Antiworlds kick out a sumptuous UHD physical release. Wheatley clearly values the small scale and the tactile, even in the wake of for-hire exploits like The Meg 2. Rarely a filmmaker who’ll rest on his laurels, Bulk isn’t so much a return to micro-budgets as just the next stop on a career tailored to constant forward momentum, whatever the cost.

Bulk is a sort-of-linear sci-fi yarn that’s been deliberately over-complicated, but Wheatley ensures there are enough handholds along the way to keep viewers hanging on. Ostensibly, some boffins in a lab running reckless experiments with a ‘Brain Collider’ have caused a “reality quake”, rupturing the narrative of the film’s interior world. A house on the peripheries of the blast zone has been ear-marked as a kind of save haven, but even this two-up, two-down isn’t immune to after-effects caused by proximity. Reporter Corey Harlan (Sam Riley) arrives on the scene only to be met by two semi-familiar figures, Noah Taylor’s possible spy Karl Sessler and Alexandra Maria Lara’s time-keeping scientist and “multi-dimensional estate agent” Aclima Benton. Through index cards and VHS orientation videos, Corey goes from one ‘room’ to the next, jumping through time and space on a journey to get to the bottom of what’s going on, both externally and internally with his own fogged-up memory.

This is mainly a washing-line from which Wheatley gets to hang all sorts of miniature moments (usually involving miniatures), as he presents a delightfully handmade escapade in sci-fi madness. The humour has  more than a dash of Python to it, the (mostly) monochrome presentation smacks of Godard’s Alphaville, and everywhere there’s the scatological approach to reason redolent of Gilliam’s Brazil. Coming in at a tight 90 (actually 95 when you add on the year’s best end titles) because “any longer seems like an indulgence”, Bulk rarely stays still long enough for restlessness to set in.

It’s very breathlessness can be the cause of a more macro fatigue, but generally speaking there’s always something interesting happening to distract you. Bulk is an ideas factory, be it the notion that the house itself is alive (the walls are thin, “emotionally”), and that the events that occur in a home amount to time and life imprinted on the inanimate, or Wheatley’s more metatextual commentary throughout on the unreality of cinema. There’s an awful lot of joy in the chaos. For Wheatley, the movies are multi-dimensional. You get to hop from a noir to a war film to a serial-style jungle adventure to a post-apocalyptic B-movie. All that’s required is to go through another door.

Taylor and Lara crop up again and again, the former as a litany of supporting characters, the latter in various iterations of Aclima. In a practical sense this small cast helps keep the costs of production down, but it also works for a movie that has notions of eroded identity at it’s heart. Bulk comes across as a rallying cry against conformity and unanimity. It’s fearful and suspect of the ordinary. Both Corey’s jumbled-up sense of memory – of self – and the recurrence of Taylor in so many guises keep looping us back to this paranoia that individuality is being erased or deprioritised.

One of the index cards handed to Corey early on in the picture rather wryly says “GO WITH IT”, which feels like another of Wheatley’s pointed communiqués direct to the audience. It’s sage advice. Much like the paintings and artwork for the movie (also Wheatley’s), Bulk is a deliberately messy endeavour, thrown toward us as a rejection of the banality proffered forward by streaming services and major studios. He’s sating a thirst for non-conforming material. And while this endeavour wears many influences on it’s sleeve that may challenge notions of pure originality, the effort to keep it real by exploding reality is appreciated.