Men. It's a great title. Paired with a slick poster — a menacing man has the word plastered across his eyes like a warning label — it presents a frank and urgent context for Alex Garland's latest horror offering. As the writer/director has with Ex Machina and Annihilation, Garland will explore gender dynamics through genre tools, delving into the horrors of the real world by manifesting their nightmarish extremes onscreen. Men follows this form, but unfortunately, it has less to say than its sisters.
Art house darling Jessie Buckley (Wild Rose, The Lost Daughter, I'm Thinking of Ending Things) stars as Garland's latest harrowed heroine, the recently widowed Harper, who travels four hours from her city life to a remote country manor where she hopes the quiet and rural splendor will help her heal. No such luck; this is a place infested with men. And all of them are out to destroy her, her sense of safety, her mental health, and her bodily autonomy.
It begins with irksome microaggressions from Geoffrey, the rental owner who asks intrusive questions about her marital status, playfully scolds her, and indulges in the kind of low-boil misogyny of a vaguely creepy uncle. But her peace is truly shattered when a blissful walk in the woods is interrupted by a stalker, bloody, naked, and glaring at her. A male cop is little help, suggesting she's in no real danger. A bearded barman is bored by her story, while two local toughs scowl. Even the vicar offers no solace, only grief — and some nonconsensual touching. Strangely, all of these men share the same face. English actor Rory Kinnear plays every role (with relish!), including that of a curse-spitting schoolboy, thanks to some CGI compositing (that looks jarring in the wrong way).
The first act is grounded in such commonplace misogyny that Geoffrey's insensitive remarks play as jokes. They're clumsily insulting, but not threatening. So, perhaps we laugh because we've all witnessed such awkwardness? However, as aggressions from other men mount, tension grows. The big house feels not like a getaway but like a labyrinth from which Harper cannot escape these menacing men. The dusky pink clothes that she favors single her out as "feminine" and thereby "other," making her a clear target against the violently green landscape. Her only lifeline — her video-calling bestie (a sharp Gayle Rankin) — is severed by a strange glitch that freeze-frames on a woman's face screaming.
Garland uses the framework of folk horror to hang his narrative. In this subgenre, a hero from the city — a place of modernity, order, and reason — is hurled into an old and untamed environment, where the locals live in superstition and the supernatural. The twist on this standard is that Harper's rationale tells her that men shouldn't be stalking her for no reason, shouldn't be dismissing her feelings about her own experiences, and shouldn't be intruding on her body as if it was theirs by right. Except you don't need to go to some remote rural village to come across such men. They are, as Harper sees in every Rory Kinnear role, everywhere.
In Ex Machina, Garland lured audiences in with Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), an affable hero with a sharp mind, a questioning eye, and a good heart. He sought to save the "princess" of this sci-fi fairytale, the female-coded android Ava (Alicia Vikander), from the tyrannical "king," the tech billionaire (Oscar Isaac) who invented her. However, as that 2014 movie goes on, there are more and more clues that Caleb is not the hero but a white knight more interested in proving his own valor than actually doing good for Ava. Garland used the default setting for a movie protagonist — a straight, white male of reasonable good looks — to trick us into thinking this was the character we're meant to root for, only to reveal that Caleb is not as noble as we would assume.
In Men, perhaps it's meant to be daring to put audiences into the hiking boots of a woman plagued by horrid men. To his credit, Garland dresses up the film with lush visuals of natural beauty and human body horror. It's not only the leering looks and various false teeth of the men that are unnerving, but also their de-evolution into a shape-shifting beast that feels like the nightmare child of John Carpenter and Ridley Scott. But for all that sinister spectacle, the message of Men is disappointingly basic. Rather than deeply engaging with the experience of his female character, Garland births schlocky, splashy horror sequences to spoon feed — presumably to a cis-male audience — a vague concept of misogyny and the trauma and terror it brings daily. And hey, it's 2022, when people who can get pregnant are being threatened with the loss of autonomy over their own bodies still. So it's not that such a message isn't relevant. It's just frustrating that as sincere as Garland may be, he has nothing much to say. Yeah, being a woman in a man's world is scary. What else?
Asking male audience members to relate to a woman isn't new territory. Garland has done it himself in Annihilation. But here it feels flat, not because of how Harper is presented, but because of how her world is. Buckley is riveting as a woman combatting not only this swarm of men, but also her thundering feelings of regret, grief, rage, and fear. But the path she walks is one well-worn, even if Garland has built some gruesome landmarks along the way.
While I was in the thick of it, my heart thudded hard. My eyes scoured the windows behind our headstrong heroine, watching her back when no one else would. I screamed in terror at a smartly executed jump scare that plays to a pretty common nightmare among the women I know. I was hooked. I was on the ride...but I was left wanting. While that final act is full of violence, gore, and some bizarre body horror, it lacks the daring to make a statement. So in the end, its title feels less like a threat and more like a tired groan: Men.
Men opens in theaters May 20.
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