A gripping, hallucinatory thriller for the #MeToo era, British cult writer-director Alex Garland’s latest trip into the Twilight Zone is a mind-bending, flesh-ripping nightmare painted in 50 shades of toxic masculinity. Riffing on folk horror, body horror, and slasher movie tropes without falling into simple genre conventions, Men features buzzy rising star Jessie Buckley (Fargo, The Lost Daughter) alongside an army of Rory Kinnears, maximising the eerie power of having multiple versions of the versatile James Bond regular playing all but one of the male roles. This device has historically worked well for comedians including Peter Sellers, Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy, but here it seems to serve a more ambitious narrative purpose as visual metaphor for the ways that abusive male behaviour is mirrored and replicated in a patriarchal society.
Just days after its North American theatrical launch by indie powerhouse A24, Men is screening in Cannes this week in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar, then opens across most of Europe in early June. For Garland, it marks a step down in scale after his troubled sci-fi epic Annihilation (2018), returning to the chamber-drama scope of his feted directing debut Ex Machina (2014). Although the plot is a head-scratcher at times, and arguably adds up to less than the sum of its parts, the performances are strong, the mood boldly surreal and the visual effects highly impressive. Even if the director’s opaque male-feminist intentions are likely to prove divisive, positive reviews, highly rated cast and elevated genre elements should translate into solid box office rewards.
Buckley stars as Harper, a young Irish woman living in London, where her marriage has just imploded with the death of her hot-tempered husband James (Paapa Essiedu), which was either a tragic accident or a grisly suicide that he cruelly blamed on her in advance. Haunted by grief and guilt, Harper flees to a luxurious rented holiday home deep in the English countryside for two weeks of restful, healing, post-traumatic solitude. Her first act on arrival is eating an apple from the garden, a heavy-handed jab of Biblical symbolism paying homage to history’s first recorded case of female victim-blaming. The landlord, genial buffoon Geoffrey, is the first of Kinnear’s transformations, and played for easy laughs.
The luminously verdant, sleepy rustic setting initially relaxes and enchants Harper. An exquisitely filmed scene in a derelict railway tunnel, which she transforms into a giant musical instrument, is touched by magic. But these idyllic rural spaces soon begin to take on a more menacing aura for a young woman walking alone. Especially when she attracts unwelcome attention interest from a bizarre stalker, a naked forest dweller covered in scars and twigs, who appears to have stepped straight out of ancient pagan folklore.
Harper is further spooked by a bratty teenager who assails her with gendered insults, a creepy priest who appears to have sexual designs on her, a pair of scowling young men in the village pub, and more. All want something from her, and all turn nasty when she does not oblige. All are played by Kinnear, making extensive use of wigs, accents and CGI facial tweaking. On a symbolic level, this inspired casting stunt is perhaps intended to suggest that all men are essentially the same needy, predatory, entitled beast behind their cosmetic surface differences. As a visual motif, these multiple Kinnears are uncanny and unsettling, with echoes of the doppelgangers in Charlie Kaufman’s darkly comic satires.
Like most of Garland’s work, Men gestures towards deep themes and complex issues without making much of a firm statement about them. Even so, he is clearly drawing here on the real-life horror inherent in gaslighting, stalking, victim-blaming, domestic abuse, emotional blackmail and more – all tactics that men routinely direct at women. There are other currents at play in this feminist fever dream too, including pre-Christian symbols of fertility and rebirth. The folkloric archetype of the Green Man and stone carvings of a Sheela Na Gig, an ancient icon of feminine sexual power, figure prominently.
These covert themes become overt in the film’s delirious WTF finale, an eye-popping, jaw-dropping exercise in visceral body-horror. Major credit is due here to visual effects supervisor David Simpson, and to Kinnear for spending a week writhing around in slime and blood. This bravura sequence may leave viewers wondering what the hell they just witnessed, but it is a trippy tour de force, pushing Garland’s slender directing portfolio to a whole new level of visionary weirdness. An elegant avant-choral score by Garland regulars Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow also helps keep dramatic tension at a steady nerve-jangling level.
Director, screenwriter: Alex Garland
Cast: Jessie Buckley, Rory Kinnear, Paapa Essiedu, Gayle Rankin
Cinematography: Rob Hardy
Editing: Jake Roberts
Production design: Mark Digby
Visual effects: David Simpson
Music: Ben Salisbury, Geoff Barrow
Production companies: DNA (UK), A24 (US)
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Directors’ Fortnight)
In English
100 minutes
