Over the course of two feature films (Ex Machina and Annihilation) and one miniseries (Devs) with him at the helm, Alex Garland has proven himself to be a crafter of heavily allegorical sci-fi fables whose slick, enthralling visuals belie the fundamental shallowness of their ideas. Men finds Garland turning from science fiction to folk horror and producing a work that exemplifies his best and worst tendencies. This is perhaps his most visually and aurally arresting work and simultaneously his clunkiest attempt yet to plumb the depths of human psychology and gender relations through genre sleight of hand.
Men is ultimately about as deep as its title, a swipe at the multi-faceted terribleness of its titular subject that rarely gets beyond being a mere catalogue of the different ways that guys can be irritating around and dangerous toward women. Throughout the film, Rory Kinnear plays multiple roles, each one embodying a different shade of masculine toxicity. These men, from a bratty child to a lecherous vicar, make the grieving Harper’s (Jessie Buckley) stay at a spacious manor in the English countryside a hellish one, emotionally terrorizing her in ways that are at first subtle before turning noxious and, finally, surreally terrifying.
The getaway is occasioned by the tragic death of Harper’s husband, James (Paapa Essiedu), which may or may not have been a suicide, but was in either case precipitated by an ugly quarrel in which James attempted to manipulate Harper into staying with him by threatening to kill himself. Harper’s sojourn in the country is intended as a bit of self-care, but there’s something uncanny about the patch of rural England that she retreats to: Not only does every man in the small town near the manor have the same face, even the lush foliage of the surrounding woods radiates an unnatural, almost toxic, green glow.
In a remarkably unsubtle biblical nod, the first thing that Harper does upon arriving at her rental is to pick an apple off a tree and take a bite out of it, an act for which she’s half-jokingly chided by the estate’s doltish owner (Kinnear). Garland’s point could scarcely be more obvious: There’s nothing wrong with munching on a piece of fruit, but that won’t stop men from trying to make a woman feel guilty about it. It’s clear that Harper has escaped the hustle and bustle of London, but now, trapped in Allegoryland, it’s impossible to imagine her ever successfully recharging her emotional batteries what with every man here following Adam’s lead.
Men’s off-kilter atmosphere is redolent of Robert Altman’s Images, and greatly enhanced by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow’s creepy, dissonant score (shades of György Ligeti). Garland constructs some eerie, Halloween-esque sequences in which a naked stalker (Kinnear) invades her rental, looming in the background, often just slightly out of focus. And in the gonzo, Gozu-inspired finale, the filmmaker goes full-bore into surrealistic horror. Unfortunately, unlike John Carpenter or Miike Takashi, Garland is never content to allow his more resonant images to speak for themselves, as they’re always leading toward some clearly defined thematic point.
If surrealists like Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel explored the unconscious by tapping into a world of dreams through their art, Garland’s surrealistic imagery is only in the service of banal sermons. In one of the film’s most indelible sequences, a monstrous amalgam of all the men played by Kinnear get their arm sliced in half longways, producing two long tentacle-like appendages up to the elbow, which simultaneously suggest two grotesque penises and a gaping vaginal opening. But for Garland, such a strange and haunting image must be explained, namely in the last of Men’s many flashback scenes, which presents a kind of rubric for interpreting the film as Harper’s elaborate trauma response to James’s untimely demise.
One of the problems with tying everything back to James’s death, though, is that it only highlights how ill-defined Harper is as a character. Buckley very precisely plays her as a strong, independent woman struggling with profound grief, but beyond her relationship to James, Harper is largely a cipher, a businesswoman of some vague sort who happens to play the piano and has at least one sympathetic female friend, Riley (Gayle Rankin), but whose personal hopes, desires, fears, and anxieties all remain a complete mystery to the viewer.
Harper doesn’t really do much in Men beyond standing idly by as things are done to her. And while this reflects the dynamic of a men constantly invading women’s privacy, it also highlights one of the film’s most telling ironies. Because Garland gets so much more mileage out of Kinnear’s creepy evocations of pernicious blokedom than he does in exploring the contours of Harper’s psyche, the film’s pithy title turns out to be all too revealing: It may have a woman at its center, but Garland’s latest is ultimately much more interested in men.
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Tldr: This film is an extremely stupid exercise in being a ‘feminist’ ‘ally’ made by a clueless man.