TALE OF THE UN EXPECTED

Over the course of his seven movies, the director has compiled a kill list longer than your arm. Death by suffocation, death by hammer, death by bullet (that happens a lot), death by knitting needle, death by immolation, death by falling from a great height, death by having your head crushed by the wheel of a slow-moving van. You name it, chances are that Wheatley has offed someone on screen with it.

BEN WHEATLEY HAS GOT BLOOD ON HIS HANDS. LOTS OF BLOOD.

But too much killing can corrode the soul. And, like Clint Eastwood in , Wheatley was done with it. “You can end up with a run of movies which are all gruesome and horrific,” he says. And so, quietly, he has been moving in a different direction for a while now. His last film, the caustic comedy , featured a body count of precisely zero. “That was a big deal for me, to make a film where nobody died,” he laughs. “We’re getting there, in baby steps.” He was looking for something to continue that streak, and also stretch some other muscles, when a script came his way courtesy of producer Nira Park. It was an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s classic Gothic novel, . And though it, admittedly, had a smidgen of death in it, it was far from bloodthirsty and otherwise filled with colours and shades and beats that were unlike anything Wheatley had directed before. “I wanted to makehas dark elements, and it has a psychological, haunting story within it, but it’s also about these two people in love. That was the main thing.”