A Field in England - What's happening!?

Watched two films while I was back at my parents' place in Ilford over the Christmas period, the first of which was A Field in England.  This film has had an experimental release, in that it was released on multiple formats all at the same time.  It was released in cinemas at the same time as it was put out on DVD and made available for download.  One presumes that the point of this is to test out a new model of cinematic distribution, and to find out if the studios can beat the pirates by undercutting them at source.  Having seen the film though I wonder if the point was to cynically generate a bit of hype for a film that otherwise doesn't have much going for it.

A Field in England stars Michael Smiley (who will always be Tyres from Spaced) and Reece Shearsmith; Smiley is noble soldier who has absconded from his English civil war regiment and Shearsmith the investigator sent to find him.  They come across each other just after Shearsmith's character has escaped with a small band of soldiers from a bloody battle.  What happens next is a monochrome trip through the mind as Smiley's O'Neil forces the soldiers to hunt for an unspecified treasure in a field surrounded by strange mushrooms.

And that's kind of it really.  The characters have a bit of banter, O'Neil looks mad and evil, there's some mystical stuff and at the end it isn't completely clear what has happened - or if in fact anything has happened at all.  Just like Susperia, A Field in England is a bit like experiencing someone else's bad dream.  Perhaps the characters are all dead on the field of battle and lingering in a black and white English purgatory?  Perhaps the characters all ate a stew made with magic mushrooms and are on a 90 minute long bad trip?  Who knows?  I don't, and the internet doesn't seem to either.

On the Mark Kermode film show one of the public emailed in recently to opine that their favourite moment of cinema this year was Reece Shearsmith coming out of a tent - a reference to a moment in A Field in England when Shearsmith's character emerges from O'Neil's tent tied up and grinning madly.  Why this is in any way a 'great' moment of cinema is beyond me.  Perhaps if you buy into what is happening as some sort of existential journey across medieval England then this scene has significance, if you don't buy it then it becomes just another mad moment in a mad and baffling film.  By all means watch A Field in England, but don't tell me I didn't warn you.