Kafkatesque 'MEN’ Favors Allegory, Mood Over Plot

Men? Meh.

If we feel pain, are we doomed to it? Writer-director Alex Garland’s latest film, Men, is plagued by this one idea: the cyclical, unwavering nature of pain and abuse. Jessie Buckley is Harper, a woman suffering. After a traumatic incident involving her former husband (Paapa Essiedu), Harper retreats to the English countryside to find some quiet away from the city and the life she shared with her ex. While she intends to give herself space for emotional healing, Harper instead finds an intrusive, hellish male community seemingly dead-set on breaking her down further. Events turns more weird, then utterly hellish.

Allegory and allusion dominate the framework of Garland’s A24-produced film to the point where plot becomes secondary. Almost an afterthought. The simplistic arc of a woman whose relationship with men has been utterly poisoned by abuse plays out in unsettling fashion, becoming increasingly horrific as it borrows imagery of birth and rebirth to deliver a nihilistic message about cycles of abuse and the domineering nature of men.

To Harper, all men become faceless adversaries (almost every man in the movie is played by Rory Kinnear wearing a different set of dentures and wig). Each is set on discrediting or insulting her when not outright stalking her. Kinnear takes the form of a prying caretaker named Geoffrey, a schoolyard bully, a vengeful vicar, a disdainful police officer, and a mythic denuded entity who becomes more and more feral with each brush with Harper. Kinnear is terrific in the role(s), lacing concern with condescension and generally injecting each scene with the anxiety that he may overstep at any given point.

There’s a bevy of references to mythology, religion, and ancient deities that the more academically-minded could have a field day dissecting, whereas most layman viewers will find Garland’s thematic approach to be both overreaching and pretentious. And they wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. Even for a studio like A24, this is pretty fringe, acquired taste material.

In his feature debut Ex Machina, Garland explored the fine line between artificial intelligence and humanity to astounding results, introducing the world to Alicia Vikander while delivering an intelligent knockout of horror-tinged science fiction. The film worked as both a heady treatise on consciousness and an effective horror-sci-fi. Soon after, he turned his attention to a reality-altering extraterrestrial threat in the Natalie Portman-starring Annihilation. The film was a certifiable box office disappointment, confounding mainstream audiences who found Garland’s kaleidoscopic conclusion too much to swallow. It make its way into my top ten that year. Both of Garland’s first two features matched style, philosophy, and entertainment in a way that Men never quite manages.

In this third feature film, the English novelist turned filmmaker has perhaps taken a step too far into the esoteric, delivering a thematic horror film that can be at times irresistibly watchable but is also recklessly anti-populistic. It’s a movie that lives and dies on mood, requiring deconstruction rather than offering simple pleasure. Men will find some love within small critical circles and amongst a certain type of horror aficionado but will largely be dismissed out of hand as metaphorical slop by the rest.

Somewhere in the early stages of the film, Men establishes itself as a “waking nightmare” for the gentler sex though it’s never quite “scary” so much as it is viscerally disquieting and thematically sinister. That it’s also rather one-note is a knock against the feature. What Men lacks in texture, Garland attempts to makes up in terms of tempo and volume, to varying success. Buckley is solid as a woman coming to terms with grief, abuse, and trying to turn a new page but even she is a bit of an empty vessel to pour all the narrative pain into. She becomes a punching back. We never get to know who she is beyond her suffering and that is, at least in part, a discredit to the central gender-conceit.

A totally WTF conclusion will surely be the sticking point/point of no return for most audiences, with Garland turning to striking, disturbing imagery and abject body horror to hammer home his thesis. No easy answer is provided. No tidy bow is left to tie things up. Instead, events are left widely up to interpretation, making Men easily Garland’s least accessible film yet and perhaps his boldest. But definitely not his best.

CONCLUSION: The latest from A24 relies on thematic and academic allusions to unspool a gender-horror film that’s meager on plot and dense on WTF moments. Rory Kinnear is memorable as a grinning Cheshire Cat of a caretaker but the film is a decidedly surrealistic jumble; abstract and nihilistic to the point of no return.