#75: Men
Release Date: May 20th, 2022
Format: Streaming (Max)
Written by: Alex Garland
Directed by: Alex Garland
3.5 Stars
Men is quite fascinating. Like many great fictional narratives, it’s a simple idea that hides some depth. It’s a swimming hole that you’re not sure exactly where the bottom is.
The story involves Harper, whose husband recently committed suicide, taking a vacation in the countryside of England. There she is met by a genial but odd property owner who shows her the 500-year-old vacation home that she’ll be staying in (and jokingly warns her not to eat the apples in the front yard). The allusion is obvious, as well as the intent of director Alex Garland. Men is an allegorical fable as much as it is horror/thriller. We are entering the intellectual realm of such movies as The Shining, Get Out, and The Witch, movies that overtly or covertly deal with genocide, racism, and religious extremism, respectively, while also trying to horrify us. For Men, we’re dealing with the very origins of misogyny and the societal power dynamic between men and women.
Back to the story…a walk in the forest behind her vacation home sets off a series of troubling events: Harper encounters a mysterious, imposing figure running towards her in a tunnel; she sees a naked man in a field, who stalks her back to her home; she speaks with a policeman who coldly takes her police report (and a female police officer who empathetically speaks with Harper); she is taunted by an adolescent boy in front of a church; she confides to a priest about the circumstances surrounding her husband’s suicide (who was both emotionally and physically abusive), only to have the the priest question how she feels about driving her husband to take his own life since she didn’t give him an opportunity to apologize; it’s her fault, according to the priest.
These encounters grow increasingly more menacing, until we reach a climactic scene that I can’t really do justice to with words. You’ll have to watch it.
I was entertained the whole time, and I was really impressed with the performances and Alex Garland’s direction. This is the second feature film I’ve seen of his, along with Ex-Machina, which I also enjoyed. It’s a beautiful movie, Men, and he displays an excellent control over mood. There are no wrong notes here tonally. He does clearly owe a debt of gratitude to Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, but I never felt that Men was overtly derivative (and in the best way possible, Men wetted my appetite to re-watch Repulsion, one of those movies you watch once and absolutely love and have no good explanation for why it took you another ten years to watch again).
I do have a few minor critiques involving Garland’s narrative. He is dealing with big, metaphorical ideas, and his storytelling is highly evocative, but that doesn’t mean his audience will just accept the ideas they are being presented with and being told, “Here, you connect the dots. Pretty clever, huh? Did you get that part about the births and the iconography in the church? Or how the whole galaxy seemed to open up to Harper at the end? Did ya get it? Did ya get it?”
I’m not sure I got everything Garland wants me to get, and I’m not sure it’s a great sign that I wanted to rewatch the ending with D this morning to see if I missed anything, but that does not sour my general impression of this movie. Men is a lush, terrifying fable that I found fascinating.
