Bulk
Journalist Cory Harlan has been kidnapped and poisoned, though he is not sure by whom, nor even if the people who have kidnapped him were the ones who injected him with the heavy metals which could kill him within a few hours or if they are trying to save him, pulled from the back of a car at a remote house which he comes to realise is linked with his former friend Anton Chambers, now a reclusive oligarch tech billionaire.
Manhandled by former police officer Karl Sessler and womanhandled by the less abrasive but equally urgent Aclima Denton, a scientist who worked alongside Chambers on what is called “the brain collider,” despite his scrambled memories Cory is given an urgent task, to enter an interdimensional portal where he will meet versions of Aclima and Sessler in a warzone, some of whom will assist him and others who will disrupt his purpose of locating Chambers in the dimensional multiverse beyond the distortion zone.
A unique filmmaker whose works have encompassed sinister thrillers such as Kill List, dark comedies such as Sightseers, the twisted folk horror of A Field in England and In the Earth, the dystopian urban dwelling satire of High-Rise and the shenanigans of Free Fire, following the Hollywood holiday where he unleashed Meg 2: The Trench he has returned to micro-budget with lo-fi and largely monochrome science fiction oddity Bulk, its world premiere opening the “midnight madness” strand of the 2025 Edinburgh International Film Festival.
Resisting any attempt to describe or pigeonhole it with narrative trapdoors and a revolving door of stylistic and editing choices from staccato to hypnotic, Wheatley’s hand-written end credits include a plethora of inspirations, many of them classic science fiction series, and with avatars of his guides scattered across the wastelands recalling a similar fragmentation in City of Death as Cory plays War Games in a digital netherworld akin to The Deadly Assassin‘s Matrix it is no surprise that Doctor Who is among the influences listed.
Starring Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ Sam Riley as Cory, increasingly disoriented in a place where time and identity, and with it any sense of loyalty, are tenuous and shifting, The King’s Man’s Alexandra Maria Lara as Aclima, appropriately acclimatising him to the environment, Predestination’s Noah Taylor as the multiplicity of Sesslers and Members Club’s Mark Monero as the elusive Chambers, unforthcoming when found, Bulk is less narrative and more a mesmeric experience which has little inclination to explain itself.
Feeling at times like a mad children’s show of the seventies too disturbing and deranged to ever be broadcast, a game of imagination with primitive model work and effects, characters superimposed in strange and unreal environments with deliberate awkwardness, Bulk is an overcast day in a murky and fractured mind rather than the promise or reward of eternal sunshine, an angry and confrontational Möbius strip wound tight to keep its strange secrets even as it consumes itself.
The Edinburgh International Film Festival continues until Wednesday 20th August
