For all the mystery that shrouds Men, writer/director Alex Garland’s new folk horror for A24, the film’s story about a persecuted woman trying to find peace in a world full of lewd, horny men is surprising easy. Men is often compelling in its brutality as it tells a compelling story about the multi-faceted monster that misogyny really is. But Men struggles to keep his messages and all of their intoxication in focus, largely because of his frustrating obsession with making you question how much of his otherworldliness is real.
Men tells the story of Harper Marlowe (Jessie Buckley), a young widow who embarks on a lonely retreat in the English countryside after the unexpected and gruesome suicide of her husband James (Paapa Essiedu). Men doesn’t reveal much about Harper or James as individuals, or what first brought them together as a couple, but the film uses flashbacks to reveal the toxic mix of abuse and emotional manipulation that ultimately led to the end of their marriage. Although Harper knows that leaving James was the right decision and that James’ suicide was not her fault, she can’t help but feel partly responsible and psychologically trapped by the traumatic circumstances surrounding his death.
This feeling of being stuck and hurt by a person’s emotional violence, even after they have died, is one of the first manifestations of the malevolent entity referred to by Men’s title. Men reveals that while Harper’s journey is her own, almost everyone she associates with – except for her friend Riley (Gayle Rankin) – assumes she’s traveling with a man because they couldn’t possibly have the desire to do so can go out alone.
“Everyone” is a charged term in the context of Men, in part because there really aren’t that many other people living in the remote and impossibly picturesque village where Harper’s has rented out a luxurious mansion all to itself. Aside from Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear), the awkward, awkward parody of a fellow Englishman who owns the house where Harper lives, the only other people who really live in the village seem to be a small collection of male townspeople – all of them too are inexplicably and unsettlingly portrayed by Kinnear. Whether Harper himself can see that every person identified as male she meets in the village has the same adult male face is not clear, and Men leaves that question open for you to interpret as the story grows stranger and becomes more symbolic.
Though Men alerts her to the danger that lurks around Harper, it’s only when she ventures into the nearby woods for a walk and encounters a naked man—Kinnear, once again—that she realizes. Being chased through a remote forest by a mad man with bruises and cuts is alarming in itself. But an important element of the horror Men conjures up is how easy it is for Harper’s men to dismiss their fear, no matter how undeniably justified it is.
While these are important feelings she experiences as Men unfolds, neither fear nor guilt are what define Buckley’s Harper, a woman who reflexively hides parts of her personality from strangers, more out of caution than anything else. One of the few women to star in Men, Harper unexpectedly becomes a last girl of sorts as the film mutates into a Home Invasion thriller that’s equal parts intellectual and straight-forward. The men’s implied supernatural trappings invite you to question his heroine’s state of mind. But Buckley brings an unwavering determination to her portrayal as Harper, reinforcing the idea that the only person who could imagine this simply “being in her head” is someone who’s never known what it felt like when his agency and bodily autonomy are disregarded because of their sex or gender.
The odd energy each of Kinnear’s various characters occasionally has plays so enigmatic because men don’t really tell you who they are, other than the fact that they all struggle with women in different ways. Geoffrey’s silly emotional atrophy, for example, can make it difficult for the village priest or innkeeper to see much of himself in him. But Men shows you how what binds them together is an almost elemental disdain and lust for Harper.
At times—particularly when its male characters are reveling in their basest, it-driven sexual impulses—Men bears a certain narrative resemblance to Emerald Fennel’s Promising Young Woman. But unlike Promising Young Woman, where you should be partly appalled because all of his seemingly “good” men were genuinely awful, Men leaves little room to question how each of his title characters poses an existential threat to Harper.
A24
A lot of what happens in the final acts of Men is genuinely baffling and shitty in a way that makes you appreciate Garland for being willing to go there. That said, the way Men ends will also have you questioning the extent to which Garland has thought through the visuals and implications of his story as a whole, beyond their immediate ability to make you deeply uncomfortable.
Men wants to make you think more deeply about what he’s trying to say, and it’s likely many people watching the film would be inclined to do so. But the same heightened reality that makes Men’s Fear so powerful ultimately has a confusing effect on the film’s message, so much so that you can’t be sure Garland himself understood what he was trying to say.
The men also star Sarah Twomey, Zak Rothera-Oxley and Sonoya Mizuno. The film hits theaters on May 20th.