Men review: a gory horror movie with many questions and no answers

If the sole goal of cinema was to provoke a memorable emotional response in an audience — to make them feel something, Anything, as long as they feel it powerfully — then Alex Garland’s Menwould count as an undisputable success. The writer-director’s follow-up to 2014’s Ex Machina and 2018’s AnnihilationThis film is sure to make audiences feel strong sensations. It’s a provocative, button-pushing film, full of startling imagery and aggressive metaphors. A24’s reputation for extreme visions is evident in many of its projects. Men it is very unlikely that audiences will feel indifferent or bored.

However, the reactions to the film will likely vary more than usual when they are confronted with provocative films. MenThis screen seems to be more about starting arguments than telling any coherent, meaningful story. The likelihood is that viewers will argue as much about what was shown on the screen as about its meaning. Garland has given them a kind of lush, moving Rorschach inkblot, open to so many different interpretations that it won’t be surprising if people walk away with an InceptionA message is delivered to everyone based upon their belief system. The emotional response depends on whether Garland believes they are backing them up, or telling them off.

This plot is easy to set up. After a traumatizing experience with James (Paapa Esiedu), Harper, a young woman plays the role of Harper. She retreats to an idyllic English country estate. Garland’s script reveals that trauma in bits and pieces over time, letting it change shape in the audience’s mind organically as each new revelation emerges. But apart from that inciting incident and Harper’s unfolding response on screen, he reveals almost nothing about her. She’s a symbol as much as a specific woman, no matter how nuanced and emotional Buckley’s performance becomes.

Kevin Baker/A24

Harper encounters a number of men both on the estate and nearby. Rory Kinnear provided digital effects that made each man look the same. The jolting encounter she has in the woods with a naked male is also played by Kinnear. The events become alarmingly more alarming as they escalate. They reach a surreal pitch, surpassing even the most shocking, adrenaline-charged situations. Annihilation. Some events draw from horror conventions while others go into the realms of David Lynch nightmares. Lynch is known especially for his flamboyant CG gores and grotesquerie.

The simplest, shallowest bad-faith reading of all this would be that Garland is saying all men are the same, and that they’re universally destructive, predatory, and inimical to women. Well ahead of the film’s release, some angry internet critics were already loudly interpreting the film this way based solely on the trailers. The film itself (if they bother watching it) likely won’t change their minds. As the film departs further and further from the realm of domestic drama and into fantasy, Garland’s symbolism is opaque enough that the most determined won’t find anything to change their minds about their initial reading.

For instance, he builds a significant recurring motif around two ancient, highly gendered images: the Green Man, usually seen as a man’s face rendered in leaves, and the sheela na gig, a carving of a naked woman with a gaping vulva often spread open with her hands. They are both primal images that have been associated with fertility and male and female power. Garland makes use of them in this piece to depict an inherent and primordial conflict and separation between the sexes. However, it is open for interpretation as to what the images mean in relation to the narrative.

Similarly, there’s an apple tree on the estate, which Harper eats from without permission as her first act upon arrival. This image is reminiscent of the Biblical story about Adam and Eve. Its forbidden fruit, which represents freedom, choice, evil and innocence, can be seen on Harper’s first act upon her arrival. Harper’s visitations and other actions around the tree suggest a dramatic increase in Harper’s loss of any innocence. But it’s never clear whether her experience with her husband somehow set all this action in motion, or whether her presence alone activated some ancient force or principle in the woods. It’s similarly unclear how real these experiences are, or are meant to be. It’s notable that Harper doesn’t comment on the fact that all the men have the same face. It’s unclear, even, whether what she’s seeing is what we’re seeing.

Kevin Baker/A24

It doesn’t matter what meaning or purpose is Men is a sensualist’s dream. Garland, Rob Hardy, cinematographer (who also shot the film) Ex Machina AnnihilationThe film has a stunningly sharp visual clarity with vibrant colors and dazzling imagery. The simple shots of the leaves on a tree covered in moss or raindrops in a pool are stunning. The music, by Ben Salisbury and Portishead’s Geoff Barrow — who also collaborated on Garland’s previous two films — blends ambient noise and music with Buckley’s vocalizations, sometimes to hauntingly beautiful effect, as when she explores a tunnel’s echo by harmonizing with her own voice. Later, a shriek of pent-up emotional pain slips so completely into the soundtrack that it might as well be something Harper is thinking more than something she’s actually doing.

Garland is able to create a sense of terror and fear throughout the movie. Men is nearly unique as a horror movie in Harper’s specific response to the threats she faces. The film’s sense of horror and uncanny remains, even though Harper gives up the victim-wailing image. Its brutal physicality may shake even the most seasoned fans of body horror.

The same sense of fear is also saturated AnnihilationGarland also filled the space with disquieting genetic mutations and heavy-handed symbolism. But Men has almost as many things in common with Ex MachinaThe science fiction story “The Defying Gravity” is largely about two men living in an arrogant-overlord mindset. They decide whether or not to view a female being as capable and capable of feeling and thinking. that story, the balance of sympathy between the male and female characters is meant to shift with each new reveal, and to be weighted with the knowledge that the female character is inhuman, an AI who may be manipulating her captors as much as they’re manipulating her.

In MenGarland simplifies the dynamics. Buckley plays Harper with a great deal of inner strength and confidence, but she’s still up against something implacable and monstrous. There’s much less sense of empathetic balance between the sides here — the script makes Harper far more human than her adversaries, without downsides or flaws to compensate. There were many little frustrations. Men, that may be the largest — that there’s so little to Harper, that her past is entirely defined by her marriage, and her present by other men, to the point where there’s so little of her to take into account in the story.

Image: A24

MenIt has some similarities to other horror movies, especially those that are based on small-scale, clear aggressions. These films often depict larger social divisions. It resembles Jordan Peele’s Move Out Some structural methods may be used. Move Out’s Black protagonist Chris clings to his phone contact with his Black friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery) as a lifeline when he’s out of his element in a white country enclave, Harper gets her only support via phone from her friend Riley (Gayle Rankin), the one other significant woman in the film. (Other notable similarities can’t be discussed without spoilers.) And the lush environs, gender tension, the focus on grief and ways to express it, the boiling anger below the surface, and the resultant primal screaming all recall Ari Aster’s Midsommar, Another film was soaked with dread, fear and an unavoidable conclusion.

But Men’s eventual direction is far harder to read than either of those two films. Its final moments in particular seem designed more to start conversations and launch a thousand “The ending of Men, explained” essays and videos than to make any kind of cogent or representative statement. “This film leans very hard into the idea that a story is a 50-50 split between the storytellers and the story receivers,” Garland states in the film’s press notes. “More than any film I’ve worked on, this one was anticipating an audience would join the conversation.” Viewers are highly likely to come away from Men full of strong opinions and emotions, but whether they’re positive ones is going to depend heavily on whether they wanted to shoulder half the burden of deciding what a film means or what it’s trying to say.

MenIt opens in cinemas on May 20,