Men

Men (2022)
dir. Alex Garland
Rated: R
image: ©2022 A24

“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.

Harper Marlowe has rented a vacation house in the idyllic – and isolated – English countryside. She needs a few weeks of tranquility after suffering a personal tragedy. Her husband, James, who was controlling and struggled with mentally instability, either jumped or fell from the balcony above their apartment in the immediate aftermath of a fight in which he punched Harper in the face, knocking her to the ground.

Geoffrey, the owner of the rental holiday country house, greets Harper as she arrives. He’s an odd duck, asking inappropriately probing personal questions – “Will it just be you staying, or…? Where’s the hubby? Mrs. Marlowe, No?” As countless women can probably attest, a complete stranger has taken it upon himself to act as a guardian to this unaccompanied woman. Questions and assumptions that would never have crossed his mind if he were addressing a Mr. Marlowe come pouring out of Geoffrey when making small talk with his newly arrived lodger.

After Geoffrey leaves her to it, Harper takes a leisurely stroll in the beautiful countryside surrounding the house. She comes to a long, dark tunnel and delights in voicing staccato notes that come rolling back to her in waves of echoes. Then a man appears, obscured in shadow, at the far end of the tunnel. He begins moving toward her very quickly. Harper turns and walks the other way. After walking through a field, she turns and sees the man, who is completely naked, standing at the edge of the field staring at her.

Later, after a Hitchcockian-level suspense sequence, in which we see the naked man walking around Harper’s rented house as she talks to a friend via FaceTime, he tries to break in. We’ve by now noticed something that Harper hasn’t, at least as far as we can tell. He’s in far worse shape – he has cuts and scars all over his face and body – but this naked man looks strikingly similar to Geoffrey. The police officer who comes to arrest the intruder after Harper’s emergency call also looks unsettlingly like Geoffrey, although not quite exactly the same.

Why does Harper not seem to notice this? Later that night, she hikes over to the local pub to have a drink. The two patrons sitting at a table – who menacingly leer at Harper as she walks in – as well as the bartender all look like Geoffrey, each with slightly different distinguishing characteristics like facial hair or tattoos.

The central conceit of Men, in which every male character, save one, is played by the same actor – Rory Kinnear, in half-a-dozen tour de force performances – brought to mind Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s 2015 stop-motion animation film Anomalisa. In that movie, the main character suffers from a mental disorder in which all other people – save one, in his case – look and sound like the same person.

Here, the mental disorder is a collective one shared by the male gender. In Garland’s hands, this sci-fi/horror premise acts to underline the ways in which men – yes, all men, due to the fact that we’ve all been socialized in the same misogynist, patriarchal society – feel empowered to take what they want from women. They do so with any number of methods: ignoring social cues of discomfort from women, objectifying them, stripping them of autonomy and agency.

One of the most shocking moments in Men comes after Harper exits a chapel where she has broken down after reliving the horrific events of her husband’s death. She sees a boy of about 10 or so sitting on the steps of a side entrance to the chapel. He’s wearing a plastic mask that looks like a woman’s face; it’s reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe. He wants to play hide-and-seek, but Harper is clearly in no mood to play a game. After she (very politely) tries to convince the boy of this, he takes the right that our culture has bestowed upon him, and strips Harper of her humanity. He callously calls her a stupid bitch when he doesn’t get what he wants from her.

A vicar, who witnessed Harper’s breakdown in the chapel, but didn’t intervene, admonishes the child for his inexcusable behavior. He then convinces Harper to sit with him on a bench by the side of the chapel so that she can unburden herself of her trauma to him. He then proceeds to lay the blame for her husband’s death at Harper’s feet. He does so while touching her without her consent, caressing her leg in an overly familiar way. If she had simply forgiven her husband for striking her in the face, the vicar tells Harper, he might still be alive.

This type of behavior is a vicious cycle within Men. In the red-tinged flashback sequences we come back to again and again throughout the movie, James uses the same deplorable tactics against Harper before he dies either by accident or suicide. The movie is cagey about which it actually is. By Harper’s own account, James went one floor up in their apartment building and forced his way in to the upstairs apartment. She assumes it was in an effort to climb down to their balcony so he could apologize, after she kicked him out following his assault on her.

But in another flashback, we witness James threatening to kill himself if Harper leaves him. He makes sure she understands that she’ll have to live with that fact for the rest of her life unless she relents and stays in this emotionally (and, later, physically) abusive relationship. The point that the movie makes is unmistakable. In our culture, it is always up to the woman to be forgiving, to turn the other cheek, even if it risks her safety and dignity.

Garland, who has explored themes of gender power dynamics in his films Ex Machina and Annihilation, intertwines this rumination on toxic masculinity with a creepy folk horror setting. One of the defining features of this horror subgenre is that of an outsider coming to what seems like a tranquil rural setting only to discover malicious intent from the seemingly harmless townsfolk. Garland’s aesthetic for Men reminded me of the British 1973 film The Wicker Man – a classic of the folk horror genre – mixed with the small-town setting of Hot Fuzz, Edgar Wright’s comedic take on both folk horror and buddy-cop action movies.

I’m not sure if Garland quite holds his metaphor together. In a few instances throughout, but particularly late in the film, when things get really bonkers, there are cuts to an alter with what appear to be a mythical tree-man on one side and a similarly mythical woman on the other. The woman’s pose features her breasts and her open legs, reminiscent of a fertility idol.

Is Garland using this iconography to suggest that men’s dominance over women is as old as human civilization? Or is it only a super creepy bit of set design used to make his already disturbing horror setting even more so? The movie doesn’t offer up any answers, so we’re left to come up with our own.

Irish actor Jessie Buckley, who popped onto my radar in 2020’s I'm Thinking of Ending Things and the 2019 HBO limited series Chernobyl, is fantastic as Harper. Buckley is required to display a wide range of emotions in Men, from profound grief to absolute terror, and she does so incredibly convincingly.

English actor Rory Kinnear’s disturbing performances as every man in Men, besides James, are utterly transfixing. You might know Kinnear as M’s aide Bill Tanner in four of the five Daniel Craig cycle of James Bond films. He also costars in the Black Mirror-adjacent – Kinnear also helped kick off that show in the memorable first episode – limited series Years and Years. Garland and his visual effects team even digitally paste Kinnear’s face over a young boy’s body so he can portray the little shit who hurls the misogynistic epithet at Harper outside the church. Usually that sort of CGI trickery is off-putting because of its uncanniness, but it feels right at home within this movie.

As a way to emphasize, I’m assuming, the difference between James and every other man we meet in Men, Garland cast Black actor Paapa Essiedu as Harper’s husband. It made me feel slightly uncomfortable to realize that Essiedu, who plays a particularly manipulative abuser, is the only Black person in an otherwise glowingly white cast – granted, the entire rest of the cast consists of only three other actors.

But, considering it’s the worst behaviors of the entire male gender that Garland is scrutinizing here, perhaps it’s forgivable. There is also the mitigating factor that Essiedu is phenomenal in the brief moments he appears on screen. He is equal parts menacing, terrifying, and oddly sympathetic.

It's that last quality, and how it inflects James’s last line – the last line of the entire movie – that made me question how probing Garland’s examination of toxic male behavior actually is. It’s possible to read it in multiple ways. Without giving it away, I’ll say that James’s final line of dialog can simultaneously be interpreted as a pathetic excuse for his behavior or a sincere belief – such an interpretation implicates what our society teaches men about what (un)healthy expressions of their emotions look like. Or, considering the circumstances, it could be read as Harper’s desperate attempt to give her dead husband the benefit of the doubt.

No matter what you walk out of Men thinking in regard to that final moment, it’s hard to deny that Garland has crafted another incendiary rumination on human interaction and gender politics. It’s a wild ride that defies easy explanation or interpretation.

Why it got 4 stars:
- As is usually the case, Alex Garland has put some startling images on screen along with the thematic depth to go with them. I wasn’t quite convinced that he had a complete handle on what he was trying to say, but it’s a harrowing journey nonetheless.

Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Men is, if nothing else, an incredibly slow burn. Garland ratchets up the tension methodically.
- I didn’t want to spoil it, but the most graphic bit of out-and-out horror here (involving a knife) is stomach-churning.
- Could this movie have come along at a more apropos time? It’s being released only a few weeks after the US Supreme Court has signaled (because of an unauthorized leak) that they will reverse Roe v. Wade, essentially destroying abortion access for half (or more) of the US population. Garland is showcasing the personal ways men are terrible to women at a time when we’re all seeing the systemic abuse hurled at women from systems of power.

Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
I saw Men at a press screening with a dozen or so other people. It felt like everyone else in the theater was as perplexed by the movie as I was. The movie is available exclusively in theaters (as best as I can tell) starting today, May 20th. It will also screen at the 2022 Cannes film festival on May 22nd. I couldn’t dig up a streaming première date.