Bulk: Ben Wheatley creates a thrilling experimental film about a failed experiment

• Reviewed from the 2025 Edinburgh International Festival

Ben Wheatley’s Bulk opens right in the middle of things, with a succession of bewilderingly decontextualised images: Earth from space; two tiny figures facing a rocky wasteland (as the inimitable voice of Bill Nighy intones “25 kilometres from the epicentre”); a pulsating sphere in a laboratory; archival footage of soldiers observing a distant atomic explosion in the desert. Then Corey Harlan (Sam Riley) wakes on the floor of a vehicle driving through the night, and asks, “Where are we going, cabbie?”, only to be informed by the sinister driver Karl Sessler (Noah Taylor), “I’m not your cabbie” in what is only the first pulling of the rug on perceived reality. Drugged and ill, Corey is helped into a townhouse by Karl and Aclima Benton (Alexandra Maria Lara) and is sure he has met them before.  

Bulk is always sending Corey right into the middle of things. Here events appear to have no defined beginning (apart from the Big Bang that begins every universe) or end, but are rather endless, entrapping nows in which Corey seeks to recover, or perhaps impose, a semblance of meaning. He identifies himself as an investigative journalist, and surmises that Karl is an ex-cop – which Karl himself denies – and that Aclima, though “a little harder to pin down”, is a scientist. Picking up environmental clues, Corey tries to reconstruct what is going on like a gumshoe in a film noir, an impression only enhanced by the nocturnal setting, his amnesia, trench coat and wisecracks, the monochrome presentation, and the deadly poison already in his system as in Rudolph Maté’s D.O.A. (1950).  

But after Aclima states that this house is “a set of coordinates inside a multi-dimensional construct” and a “narrative-based learning experience”, Corey will discover that every door here leads to a parallel universe and a different genre – war, post-apocalyptic dystopia, chase-based action, B-movie sci-fi, enlightenment quest, romance. In each of these scenarios, the only constants are Corey himself, Karl, Aclima and the elusive Anton Chambers (Mark Monero), said to have the cure for Corey’s poisoning. But even their names, characters and interrelationships shift from room to room, so that the supposedly single Corey is elsewhere married to Aclima (as Riley is to Lara), Karl is also the wizened Obi-Wan Kenobi-like Carmel Seffer, while Anton is variously billionaire, journalist, mad scientist (in fact all the characters are at times scientists) and Wizard of Oz.  

Bulk is not just home-made filmmaking – complete with instructions in the closing credits on how to recreate its DIY, largely in-camera effects – but also creates, like Paul King’s Bunny and the Bull (2009), Bill Watterson’s Dave Made A Maze (2017) and Wes Terray’s Precarious (2020), a whole world, indeed worlds largely from a single domestic location. This is an experimental film about, precisely, a failed experiment, and a chronicle of a cycling, possibly infinite quest for perfection, so that all the film’s apparent flaws (the overtly cheap artifice of the sets and model-kit props) are in fact essential to the inherent imperfections of the broken cosmos in which they unfold. Even as these four Pirandello-esque characters are in search of a coherent narrative, Wheatley crafts a postmodern poioumenon whose characters make stories and choose their own adventures, even as he lifts the veil at the film’s close, cameoing as himself and providing making-of tips.  

Wheatley’s mercurial multiverse is not just built from the tropes of movies but behaves like a provisional film in production. Corey seeks direction from cue cards as scripted prompts to guide him through all the chaos – and even though time in this house works in mysterious ways, with both Karl and Anton suggesting that they have been in there for many years, Aclima will reassure Corey, with metacinematic accuracy, that his circular journey will be a feature-length “90 mins, max”, because “any longer is an indulgence, no?” She even, like an actor on set, goes “on a break” between her versatile interactions with Corey. Meanwhile, in what Corey recognises is “a man’s story about a man”, Aclima is left to try to “fix” the destructive trail of mistakes left by her male colleagues, and to rewrite, scene by scene, the screenplay that has got her stuck in the house. Pitched between Christopher Smith’s looping Triangle (2009) and Graham Hughes’ portal SF Hostile Dimensions (2023), the wonderfully inventive, maddeningly self-referential Bulk deconstructs its own forms and, like the blast radius of a cosmic explosion, creates the universe(s) from nothing.