Starring Sam Riley, Alexandra Maria Lara, Noah Taylor, Mark Monero

Written & Directed by Ben Wheatley

Film 4 – touring selected cinemas now

According to IMDb, ‘a scientist’s string theory experiment goes wrong when his brane (sic) explodes. Corey Harlan must find him and the brane’s core in a mysterious house where doors lead to other worlds, guided by the dimensional being Aclima’.

I’ll take their word for it.

Back in the 1980s, as a young assistant director at Nottingham Playhouse, it was my task to wade through the unsolicited scripts that used to pile up each week, and respond politely, given that none of them were ever going to be produced at the theatre. They were mostly dull rather than bad, but one of them made a lasting impression on me. It must have been at least 120 pages long, typed onto ‘foolscap’ sheets (considerably larger than today’s standardised A4), as thin and greasy as Izal toilet paper. For those of you too young to remember Izal toilet paper, count yourself very lucky indeed. I remember turning to the first page and gawping at what I beheld. The dialogue was crammed into every inch of space, eschewing margins, headers or footers, and in place of character names, the dramatis personae were simply numbers.

I managed to get through about three pages. It was set in a psychiatric ward, and it was, unsurprisingly, something to do with alienation and the nature of reality. I skipped to the end where ‘9’ was being orally pleasured by ‘13’ and I suspected quite a few of the ‘numbers’ had met a bloody end one way or another. I wrote as kind a letter as I could manage, advocating the merits of double spacing and character names, and wished the writer luck with their career.

I had a horrible feeling that someone had told them to ‘write about what you know’.

After about fifteen minutes of Ben Wheatley’s Bulk, I was having flashbacks. I had been told that it was quirky, fun and mischievous – a goofy post-modern deconstructed genre parody. To be fair, there is some fun to be gleaned from its use of low-fi Airfix model shots, wobbly miniatures and shonky end-of-term video youth club SFX, but once you’ve got the idea, the pleasure swiftly palls, especially when you realise it’s going to carry on like this for another hour and a quarter.

I might even have enjoyed the quirky post-modern goofy genre parody had I had the faintest clue what was going on. There are four actors who play a variety of characters – or alternative quantum versions of themselves – and they talk incessantly for the duration about the nature of reality, and the intricacies of a plot which lost me on about page three, while travelling through multiple realities, which, by the end, rather than being distinctive, end up as a samey imaginative mush.

I toughed it out because I was reviewing it, but in the end I was left despairing that there is actually only one reality, and I was stuck in it, meaning there was no escape from watching this self-indulgent assemblage of incoherent nonsense. I’m glad Ben Wheatley (whose films I have enjoyed in the past) had such a fun time making his movie – and I might have given it the benefit of the doubt as a ten minute short – but a bit like the 120 pages of Izal foolscap back at Nottingham Playhouse in 1985, did he really have to share all ninety minutes of it with me?

Verdict: Last week, I summarised 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple as ‘watchably bonkers’. Bulk, on the other hand, is most definitely unwatchably bonkers.

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com