Alex Garland is a bold, thoughtful, yet entertaining filmmaker. Although the two films he previously wrote and directed (EX MACHINA and ANNIHILATION) leaned more toward asking big, existential questions about humanity through a sci-fi genre lens, they were nonetheless entertaining - if not blockbuster - affairs.
His new film, MEN, is a step sideways for the former novelist (he also wrote the screenplays for 28 DAYS LATER, SUNSHINE, and a few other movies not directed by Danny Boyle). This time folklore - not science fiction - is the structure that houses the questions Garland is asking. He doesn’t stray too far from the path he has been walking, but he definitely has found a stretch of thorny brush running parallel to it he has decided to trek through.
The main protagonist in MEN, Harper (Jessie Buckley,) begins the film in a state of nearly catatonic despair. Driving through the English countryside, we learn that her husband James (Paapa Essiedu) has recently killed himself after she tells him she is going to divorce him. When she arrives at the quaint cottage she plans to spend the next few weeks convalescing her mental wounds in, she is greeted by toothy, hermetically-affable caretaker Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear). Given that this is a horror movie titled MEN, we can deduce that Geoffrey may not be exactly as good-natured as he first appears to be.
After settling in the cottage, Harper has a series of unsettling events outside of it. She is stalked by a naked man during a stroll through the woods; she meets up with a peculiar looking child who calls her a “stupid bitch” after she rebuffs his attempt to play Hide and Seek with her; she’s confronted outside of a Church by a local vicar whose intentions aren’t exactly Godly; she has a run in with some men at the local bar who gawk at her lustily. Throughout her encounters we notice something: all of these men look the same. They all look like Geoffrey.
Come awards season, true justice would be seeing Rory Kinnear nominated for more than a few awards for his performance(s) here. He’s mainly onscreen as Geoffrey, but when he turns up as the other Men he differentiates them with more than just a costume change. He endows one of the men with a mouth curled into a snarl; another narrows his eyes at Harper when she enters his field of vision. We are meant to view these men as different aspects of one man, and Kinnear navigates these personality traits masquerading as characters deftly. It’s remarkable work.
Also remarkable is Jessie Buckley as Harper. Her reaction to these encounters goes from frightened to annoyed, and Buckley hits every note perfectly. Much has been written - wrongly - about how a female character can only be strong if she is kicking ass and taking names. Harper doesn’t do this - at least not at first. She’s a blithering mess at the beginning of the film, which doesn’t make her character weak, but human.
It should be clear by now that MEN is not exactly subtle in its intentions. What those intentions are is harder to parse - do all men have bad intentions? Or does Harper view all men as being the same and having bad intentions because of her experience with James? Garland leaves many of his stories open-ended, but MEN surpasses his other works in that regard by an English Countryside Mile. Filled with Biblical and pagan images and metaphors (a carving of The Green Man on Church altar mingles below a a stained glass window depicting Christ; a Garden of Eden-esque tree rains apples), MEN doesn’t have a plot so much as an atmospheric series of events that pile one allegory on top of another.
These events coalesce over a period of an hour and a half into what is one of the biggest, strangest, most daring, and downright baffling last ten minutes of a film I’ve seen in quite some time. Absolutely diving full-blown into Cronenbergian body-horror, Garland pulls out all the stops visually and metaphorically. If the preceding 90 minutes took a hammer to the face of subtlety, the ending takes a wrecking ball to a doll-house built of it.
All of this to say that your mileage with MEN will vary, depending on how much you can run with a film that’s built on atmosphere and ideas instead of a traditional three act plot structure. Garland certainly isn’t the first director to choose the esoteric over the straightforward, but MEN has a hallucinatory intensity that will turn off most audiences (it currently has a D+ Cinemascore). Come into the movie with the understanding that you will be watching an allegorical, spiritual meditation on grief and the relationship between the sexes and you may raise that score. Even if it’s just a little.