Uncanny Landscapes in 21St-Century British Cinema: The Pestilence in the Ditch

A consideration of how some recent British films are defined by their atmospheres of unease, which grow out of a bold and distinctive treatment of landscape. An uncertain tendency in recent British cinema has been to conjure atmospheres of eerie unease, depicting landscapes through which lost figures wander. The films of, among others, Andrea Arnold, Clio Barnard, Paddy Considine, Shane Meadows and Ben Wheatley play out against these landscapes, which are formed of abandoned sites that are neither rural nor urban, but somewhere in between. These liminal spaces are disorientating enclosures from which the viewer infers something malign: the pestilence in the ditch. These contaminated metaphysical spaces are travelled by the films' characters and viewers alike.