Anyone innocently wandering into A Field in England can be forgiven for thinking they’ve stepped through a time portal to the late ’60s. Along with its arty approach and unexplained allegorical premise, the movie explodes into full-on psychedelia after a certain stage—all the weirder for being in black-and-white. One wants to summon a few reference points, but even this is challenging. The movie’s a little Waiting for Godot and a little Magical Mystery Tour, with Vincent Price’s character from Witchfinder General hanging around. We should invoke Monty Python, too, for the film’s grubbiness and catch-all social criticism. (Had they been younger, the surviving Pythons might’ve made a fine cast for this.)
The actual setting has nothing to do with Swinging London; the film’s summary says it’s set in the mid-17th century, so that’s what we’ll go with.