Men

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Impressive, the way Alex Garland shifted from being just an incredibly successful author to being an incredibly successful director as well. Men follows his previous two films, Ex Machina (what a debut) and Annihilation plus the TV show Devs, all three of which he also wrote. It’s a superbly conceived film, a folk horror movie with a great cast, fabulous atmosphere, a spooky score and some fabulous imagery. But is it actually scary? Is the sense of threat felt rather than just observed? I’m not convinced, though plenty of rave reviews seem fairly sure it is.

Jessie Buckley plays an everywoman, Harper, a successful something or other with a swish apartment overlooking the River Thames, who after a messy end to a relationship involving her husband’s spectacular suicide – opening shot, so no spoiler – rents a spectacular get-away-from-it-all house in the Cotswolds, where warm stone and rolling scenery collude to produce picture-postcard England at its finest.

It cannot last, and in fact there are already cracks appearing as Harper is being shown around the house by its too-eager owner, Geoffrey, a nice-but-dim sort in check shirt, wine-coloured jumper, yellow trousers and Barbour waxed jacket. Old money is the idea.

Soon Harper has started meeting other residents of the village – a boy who tells her to “fuck off”, a priest who spots that she is grieving and counsels her too chummily with his hand on her leg, the landlord of the local pub, a policeman, a couple of local yokels, plus a proper weirdo – a naked dude with cuts all over his body who likes to insert oak leaves into the bloodily oozing slits.

Periodically Garland takes us back to the failed relationship between Harper and her now-dead man, James, played by Paapa Essiedu. These are a demonstration of modern gaslighting fringed with violence – he’s angry about something, though we’re never really sure what – in scenes Garland bathes in hazard-warning orange light.

But mostly we’re in the village where the key colour is green, migraine-inducingly green, with Harper and all the other men, all of whom are played by Rory Kinnear. Watching Kinnear as Geoffrey one minute, then the mute naked man the next, then the schoolboy, then the policeman etc is to watch deft, virtuoso acting of a high calibre, and the way that Kinnear’s physicality seems to shift with the different characters is remarkable (please don’t tell me it’s done with CG). The unifying trait: these guys are all, just like Harper’s dead husband, gaslighting the increasingly terrified woman, though in different ways. Men, huh.

Rory Kinnear as Geoffrey
Rory Kinnear as Geoffrey


Kinnear as all the village men is creepy – the urban fear of inbred rurals – but it is also a gimmick and is possibly one of the reasons why the film does not quite grip as hard as it might. The craft is getting in the way of the art. Another might be that at a certain point even Harper has to realise that something very odd is going on in this village. She has a car, why doesn’t she try and take off in it sooner?

The naked man is probably a representation of the Green Man of English folk myth and Garland has a lot of fun messing with the iconography of a figure whose iconography is very, very shadowy in the first place. This Green Man has a vagina, for instance, and we will be seeing quite a lot of it in the film’s climax, when he gives birth repeatedly to multiple full-grown iterations of characters we have already met.

In other words things do eventually get dark, frenzied, freaky and very gory and the psychological is eventually overtaken by the supernatural, much as it was in The Wicker Man (the motherlode of this sort of thing).

The endlessly versatile Buckley reminds us that she’s a very good scream queen (see also 2017’s Beast), while Kinnear must surely have boosted his profile on the other side of the Atlantic (though appearing in a Garland film will already have done that). They’re both excellent. Everything about this film in excellent, in fact. It just isn’t scary.





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© Steve Morrissey 2024







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