A 'smart and stylish' horror

By Caryn JamesFeatures correspondent

Jessie Buckley and Rory Kinnear star in this horror from Ex Machina director Alex Garland, which "wryly toys with horror tropes", writes Caryn James.

A woman alone in an isolated country house, ominous men who pop in and out of view and sharp knives at hand in the kitchen. You see where this is heading. But Alex Garland has something deeper on his mind than jump scares. A stunning, enigmatic opening scene reveals how smart and stylish Men will be. With a bitter-orange light tinting the entire screen, Jessie Buckley has a devastated look on her face and a trail of dried blood below her nose, as she sees a man's body fall, slow-motion, past her high-rise window to certain death. You might think nothing worse could happen to this woman, Harper, but the next thing you know she is driving to a restorative stay at that big, old country house. From there, Garland wryly toys with horror tropes to explore guilt, grief and the oppressive weight of the male world.

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Men picks up Garland's career-long strategy of using genre and suspense to examine gender themes. In his first and still best film, Ex Machina (2015), the horror comes from the soulless misuse of technology to create humanoid women robots. In his underrated Annihilation (2018), a team of female scientists explores a dangerous, shimmering, supernatural world. Men does not have the perfect rigour of Ex Machina. Instead, it is playful, loose and eccentric, full of mythical symbols and inventive imagery.

The film is anchored by Buckley, whose performance is fiercely real, a wise move amidst all that blatant symbolism. When Harper first arrives at the house, she picks an apple off a tree in the garden and takes a bite, which Eve could have told her was probably not the best idea. She is welcomed by the owner, Geoffrey, played by Rory Kinnear wearing prosthetic teeth, a shaggy wig and comic goofiness. That is just the start of Kinnear's entry into a world of prosthetics and special effects. Soon Harper takes a walk in the woods and sees a naked man, who seems to vanish in a blink, then later appears in the garden. She meets a schoolboy, a vicar and villagers at the local pub, all played by Kinnear, all threatening in some way.

Men

Directed by: Alex Garland

Starring:

Jessie Buckley

Rory Kinnear

Paapa Essiedu

Length: 100 minutes

Release date: 20 May (US and Canada), 1 June (UK)

Production company: A24, DNA Films

Throughout, there are orange-tinted flashbacks, revealing traumas from Harper's past, including the identity of the falling body, and a furious argument between Harper and her husband, James (Paapa Essiedu, of I May Destroy You). She is about to divorce him; and in a film largely shaped by the surreal, this intensely believable, brilliantly played scene becomes especially visceral.

Since the film is entirely from Harper's point of view, Garland invites questions. How much might she be imagining? How much of what she sees is supernatural, the reality of the fictional world on screen? It is without doubt a world of men and masculine assumptions. Except for one lone, unthreatening, briefly-seen policewoman, Harper is surrounded by men.

From the schoolboy's sexist taunt to the vicar's lechery, the characters around her reflect facets of male privilege. Just as Buckley's grounded performance gives the film psychological weight, Kinnear's serious approach to all his characters except the comic Geoffrey makes their threats to Harper feel real. The worst of the characters is the creepy vicar, with flowing grey hair and a 19th-Century attitude toward women. Toxic masculinity is a buzz phrase in today's film and TV, but he is truly its embodiment. 

Garland deftly balances scares, humour and genuine emotional trauma. Harper is not a scream queen, but a rational woman. Taking a walk, she sends her voice echoing through a dark tunnel, and has the sense to run when a mysterious figure rushes at her from the other end. The sound of that scene is elegant, with music and voices on the soundtrack suggesting howling banshees. The film's cinematographer Rob Hardy, a long-time collaborator of Garland's, creates a lush, inviting look, more light and colour than shadow.

Among the images the camera returns to often is the font in the village church, carved with the ancient image of the Green Man, a mythical character whose face is surrounded by leaves growing from his head, surrounding it like a lion's mane. What does he mean here? Men is the kind of film it can be fun to decipher, while accepting that no single solution to its puzzle exists.

Near the end, Garland ramps up the surreal elements and the special effects, gliding towards an over-the-top ending. Speaking after the New York preview screening of the film, Garland said that he hadn't quite worked out the climactic episode when he'd finished the screenplay, but later decided to do something big and ambitious. It's easy to admire his audacity, even if it is too much even by surreal standards.

A glib misreading of Men might reduce it to: "Ha! Men! They're all alike." But the film's ending emphasises how much Harper's trials and Garland's film have been about her profound tangle of love, grief and understanding.

★★★★☆

Men premieres at the Cannes Film Festival, and is released in the US and Canada on 20 May and in the UK on 1 June.

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