Director Ben Wheatley has charted an idiosyncratic course throughout his career, careening wildly from bizarre early genre exercises like Kill List and A Field In England, to the wildly ambitious J.G. Ballard adaptation High-Rise, to the near-cartoon action of 2016's Free Fire. His upcoming slate of projects doesn’t look any less wide-ranging, either; his take on Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is currently in post-production, and he’s gearing up right now to film the second Alicia Vikander Tomb Raider movie.
Wheatley is a tricky guy to pin down, is our point, so it’s not wholly surprising to learn that he’s managed to sneak a whole other movie into his current quarantine routine, before diving head-first into blockbuster land. This is per IndieWire, which reports on an interview Wheatley recently gave to Little White Lies, confirming that he shot a new horror movie over the course of 15 days recently, amidst the current lockdowns
Wheatley doesn’t give away any plot details or casting info about the movie, but did describe the film (which he shot in August) as “a response to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis,” and an effort to make a micro-budget horror movie that reflects our current, rapidly shifting reality. Given Wheatley’s general unpredictability, there’s no way to know when, if ever, the film will ever see the light of day, but the idea of it being out there, ready to explode into a new burst of (non-immediately lethal) strangeness does hold a certain appeal. Tomb Raider 2, meanwhile, is currently penciled in for a 2021 release date, and will reflect a reality in which Ben Wheatley makes a movie about Alicia Vikander shooting dudes in the face with a bow and arrow.