Men
Starring Jessie Buckley and Rory Kinnear
Rated MA15+
4/5
The latest film from writer-director Alex Garland, Men follows Harper (Jessie Buckley), a widow who arrives at a rural cottage for a vacation, only for her stay to turn into a macabre nightmare.
A horror film with strong feminist themes, Men steadily reveals the trauma in Harper’s recent past and laces its cosy countryside atmosphere with unsettling microaggressions: unwanted touch, the men of the village making flippant or intrusive comments, and landlord Geoffrey chivalrously denying Harper her agency.
With dashes of dark humour, Men explores the many mundane ways in which men blame and control women, and when a mysterious naked man starts stalking Harper, the tone escalates smoothly from creeping unease to a harrowing home under siege.
Buckley delivers a moving performance of pained resilience, and Kinnear shows striking range and physicality as every man in the village, including the landlord, stalker, vicar and a rude schoolboy. Giving nearly every character the same face in a story about abuse may be an exaggerated satire of the disingenuous “Not all men” retort used by some anti-feminists.
The climax is profoundly stressful, with Harper confronted by gruesome manifestations of the guilt imposed upon her after a recent family tragedy, but runs astray in the last few minutes. The film repeats the same abdominal body horror to the point of silliness (eliciting more than a few laughs in my theatre), yet the sequence has a sudden and strange lack of danger.
After the twin triumphs of Ex Machina and Annihilation, Men is the least of Garland’s filmography, but is still a tense, nuanced and disturbing horror film with a questionable ending, and is playing in select Victorian cinemas.
– Seth Lukas Hynes
