Harper (Jessie Buckley) has a man problem that’s multiplying.
After a traumatic event involving her unhinged husband (Paapa Essiedu), Harper leaves their London apartment for some time alone in the English countryside. Having rented a “dream” cottage, she settles in for some peace and quiet. But as the movie’s title, Men, suggests, finding respite from males won’t be quite so easy. From her nice but nosy landlord (Rory Kinnear) to the mysterious, naked man she notices on a walk through the nearby forest, men continually appear to disrupt her equilibrium.
Men is the third film written and directed by Alex Garland, after Ex Machina and Annihilation. While Ex Machina was a provocative riff on the what-if of artificial intelligence (and my favorite movie of 2015), Annihilation struck me as more diffuse—full of grand, philosophical, science-fiction ambitions that never quite coalesced as much as they should. I found Men to be more straightforward than either of them, even if it too contains tantalizing, unanswerable curiosities. A horror meditation on the biblical origins and self-perpetuating permutations of patriarchy, Men unfolds like an echoing primal scream.
Echoes play a key role in the film. Earlier on that walk through the forest, before encountering the naked stranger, Harper finds a few moments of blissful peace amidst nature. (Buckley’s startled smile in response to a clap of thunder is one of the film’s few joyful touches.) Coming upon a long dark tunnel, she sings a few notes that bounce back and forth along the walls. She smiles again, but this time the joy is cut short, as she notices a figure—likely male—at the far end of the tunnel, running toward her. On the soundtrack (Garland is once again working with sound editor Ben Barker), Harper’s notes also turn to pursue her, as they will throughout most of the film’s later, threatening moments.
To say more will require spoiling some of the movie’s key details, so you’ve been warned. It turns out that Kinnear not only plays the landlord, but also the naked man—and, in fact, every male who appears in the movie (even a foul-mouthed boy who sports a tween’s body and an uncanny, CGI variation of Kinnear’s face). It’s a joke—“men are all the same”—but also more than that, as each represents a particularly heinous tendency of patriarchal manhood. (A vicar, for instance, blames Harper for inciting lust in his otherwise pure heart.)
The vicar is a key character, because in the movie’s view, the problem of patriarchy goes all the way back to the garden of Eden. Harper, our Eve, plucks an apple from a tree upon her arrival at the cottage (the landlord teasingly reprimands her). If it isn’t clear from her first encounter with him, the naked man eventually begins to more clearly recall the Adam of Genesis; when he starts inserting twigs and leaves into the open cuts on his face, it’s a macabre, horror variation on the fig leaves Adam and Eve covered themselves with after their fall into sin. The film’s piece de resistance—a gruesome, extended, body-horror sequence in which this Adam graphically gives birth to another man, who gives birth to another, and so on, and so on until out pops Harper’s husband—functions as a commentary on the persistence of patriarchy, in a biologically ironic way.
I’m not sure Men adds up to much more than that, which makes it more comprehensible than Annihilation, but not quite as thought-provoking as Ex Machina. It’s a brazenly conceived, inventively executed gender joke, if one that gives birth to its own tail.
(5/17/2022)
