Men
Year: 2022
Directed by: Alex Garland
Starring: Jessie Buckley & Rory Kinnear
Runtime: 100 mins
BBFC: 15
Published: 08/06/22
Directed by: Alex Garland
Starring: Jessie Buckley & Rory Kinnear
Runtime: 100 mins
BBFC: 15
Published: 08/06/22
In case you don’t keep up with my reviews regularly, Alex Garland is one of my favourite writer/directors in the film industry and has been for most of my life. Suffice to say I was looking forward to his third directorial venture, British folk-horror ‘Men’. A massive departure from Garland’s usual material which tends to linger somewhere in the sci-fi thriller territory, Men looked to me like the UK’s answer to Ari Aster’s Midsommar. Now on the other side of the ordeal, I can say that my assumptions were pretty much spot on with Men not only feeling like Midsommar in tone, but also in practice with it often coming off as Garland stroking his own hubris and expecting everyone else to be on board with it. Unfortunately for him, I’m not.
Harper (Jessie Buckley) has travelled out to the countryside following the recent suicide of her husband, James (Paapa Essiedu). Once there she begins to find herself the subject of torment by the village’s male population (all played by Rory Kinnear), forcing her to re-evaluate the circumstances surrounding James’ death.
Harper (Jessie Buckley) has travelled out to the countryside following the recent suicide of her husband, James (Paapa Essiedu). Once there she begins to find herself the subject of torment by the village’s male population (all played by Rory Kinnear), forcing her to re-evaluate the circumstances surrounding James’ death.
If that seems like a brief and kind of vague summary, then believe me when I say that’s really about as much detail as I can give you. Not because of fear for spoilers, but because that’s really all it is. Throughout its one-hundred-minute runtime, Men provides no answers and only leaves you with more questions than when the film started. This in itself isn’t bad as there’s so much to dissect and analyse here from British folk legends, religious symbolism, and of course the obvious misogyny; but what does feel like a let down is the way in which Garland seems to feel as though just showing men doing bad things will make it feel like he’s making bold statements about the atrocities men commit against women. Whilst I’m sure there are layers of subtext to the film that I’ve failed to understand, I rarely felt as though what I was seeing actually had anything interesting to say other than ‘Men are bad because men’. With this coming from a male director, it almost seems as though he’s doing it to win brownie points with feminists, but he does it in such a way that I honestly don’t see it appealing to that kind of audience. Garland clearly has a lot of thoughts on the subject, but the way he puts them across in Men implies that he has no idea how to effectively communicate them.
Men is uncomfortably visceral, and once the body horror elements start rearing their head in the final act its borderline nausea inducing. There were audible gasps, sharp intakes of breath, and even a couple of walkouts during the screening I attended, and even I as a self-proclaimed veteran of gory horror found myself squirming in my seat. It’s certainly not the goriest film I’ve ever seen, but they way the gore is framed, the way it’s built up to, and how long it lasts for makes it incredibly uncomfortable to watch.
But Men doesn’t rely on its gory horror to attract the crowds, instead it places two powerhouse performances front and centre in what I would argue is the best performance of both Buckley and Kinnear’s careers. Buckley is clearly traumatised from an abusive relationship and the way she shows that in her body language is amazing, the way she carries herself around other men, and the subtle cues in her line delivery to hint that she’s hiding something or is uncomfortable without trying to give it away are truly incredible. Then Kinnear simply amazes with his revolving door act of playing multiple characters. We first meet him as Harper’s landlord Geoffrey, but he also plays every single male in the village of Cotson so he’ll crop up as a policeman, barman, vicar, and a teenage boy among others. Each one is a totally different character, and he brings a different kind of performance to each one, with all of them representing different ways men harm women.
I have a lot of theories about what Men was about, what Kinnear’s characters mean, and what the gory finale is supposed to represent. I won’t share my thoughts here for the sake of spoiling things, but I do feel like the final scene of the film involving Harper and her friend Riley (Gayle Rankin) provides a lot of answers despite no dialogue being exchanged. But there’s also a lot I don’t understand, such as why the videocalls with Riley keep cutting out, and the significance of a mask worn by one of Kinnear’s characters, and a number of other things. I have a feeling that it’s a film I will go back to again and again in an attempt to understand what Garland is really trying to say, but it’s a film I would find difficult to recommend because from what I have understood so far it feels pretentious and unproductive to the larger topic of abuse against women. An interesting and twisted approach to the topic, but not the kind of film I expected from Garland, and not the kind of film I expect to appeal to the average moviegoer.
Men is uncomfortably visceral, and once the body horror elements start rearing their head in the final act its borderline nausea inducing. There were audible gasps, sharp intakes of breath, and even a couple of walkouts during the screening I attended, and even I as a self-proclaimed veteran of gory horror found myself squirming in my seat. It’s certainly not the goriest film I’ve ever seen, but they way the gore is framed, the way it’s built up to, and how long it lasts for makes it incredibly uncomfortable to watch.
But Men doesn’t rely on its gory horror to attract the crowds, instead it places two powerhouse performances front and centre in what I would argue is the best performance of both Buckley and Kinnear’s careers. Buckley is clearly traumatised from an abusive relationship and the way she shows that in her body language is amazing, the way she carries herself around other men, and the subtle cues in her line delivery to hint that she’s hiding something or is uncomfortable without trying to give it away are truly incredible. Then Kinnear simply amazes with his revolving door act of playing multiple characters. We first meet him as Harper’s landlord Geoffrey, but he also plays every single male in the village of Cotson so he’ll crop up as a policeman, barman, vicar, and a teenage boy among others. Each one is a totally different character, and he brings a different kind of performance to each one, with all of them representing different ways men harm women.
I have a lot of theories about what Men was about, what Kinnear’s characters mean, and what the gory finale is supposed to represent. I won’t share my thoughts here for the sake of spoiling things, but I do feel like the final scene of the film involving Harper and her friend Riley (Gayle Rankin) provides a lot of answers despite no dialogue being exchanged. But there’s also a lot I don’t understand, such as why the videocalls with Riley keep cutting out, and the significance of a mask worn by one of Kinnear’s characters, and a number of other things. I have a feeling that it’s a film I will go back to again and again in an attempt to understand what Garland is really trying to say, but it’s a film I would find difficult to recommend because from what I have understood so far it feels pretentious and unproductive to the larger topic of abuse against women. An interesting and twisted approach to the topic, but not the kind of film I expected from Garland, and not the kind of film I expect to appeal to the average moviegoer.