A woman crouches on a rocky cliff overlooking the sea. She is examining a handful of white flowers with long, red stamen. She sticks a steel soil thermometer into the ground next to the flowers to check the temperature. From a distance, we see her walking along the horizon; her bright red windbreaker is striking against the green and gray of her island surroundings. She carefully drops a rock into a deep well, listening for the splash as it hits the water far below. Next, we see her recording her observations in a notebook. She writes the date – it’s April of 1973 – the temperature from the soil thermometer (14.3° C, or about 57° F) and the words “no change”.
Everything else that happens in Enys Men happens around this basic routine, which we see a dozen times over the course of the picture. It’s the most mundane depiction of data collection you could imagine. In contrast to that mundanity, the woman, referred to only as “The Volunteer” in the film’s closing credits, experiences either a psychological crisis or a metaphysical terror, though the movie never definitively answers which. We experience her reality in the form of existential dread.
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“Listen. There's only one woman in the world. One woman with many faces.” Those are the words of Satan, disguised as a guardian angel in the form of a young girl, in Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ. This is what Satan says to Jesus in order to tempt him to come off the cross and live his life as an ordinary man, so that he can have what he truly desires, a family. In the movie, Mary Magdalene, Jesus’s true love, is dead, but Satan tries to convince Jesus he can still have what he wants, only with a different woman – or many different women – since they’re all the same.
Writer/director Alex Garland has gender swapped that idea for his new film, Men. It’s an intense fever dream of a movie. Using the subgenre of folk horror, Men is an exploration of every disturbing behavior that men perpetrate against women. Gaslighting. Intimidation. Possessiveness. The threat of violence. Actual violence. The picture’s final message, delivered in its last line of dialog, struck me as being a cop-out for why so many men treat women as property. Garland seems to think it’s a misplaced desire to be loved, instead of systemic oppression and culturally accepted subjugation. Still, his movie is startling in both the themes it tackles and its hallucinatory aesthetic.
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