“Men” (2022) is Alex Garland’s third feature film after “Ex Machina” (2014) and “Annihilation” (2018). Fresh off her triumph in “The Lost Daughter” (2021), Jessie Buckley plays Harper, a woman who goes on a healing holiday to the countryside, but the process does not go as she hoped.
While “Annihilation” had scares, they were otherworldly, but “Men” chooses to focus on the gore without looking away so squeamish viewers should walk the other way. While the story is not as strong as his first film, his third film is his strongest visual film. His disciplined attention to color sets the mood of each scene and is breathtaking. It is a stunning film, and the people who found the locations and decorated the sets contributed to the film’s success. There is one CGI scene which does not work and could obliterate the sustained focus of the film. This scene could torpedo the atmosphere of the film and have audiences laughing unable to take subsequent scenes seriously. Garland is committed and audacious to his vision even when it does not work.
Garland is writing from a woman’s point of view, and he does not stick the landing. “Men” has several moments that strain the audience’s ability to suspend disbelief: a woman approaching an unfamiliar tunnel alone, not wiggling away earlier from an unwanted touch regardless of comfort and all the times that she does not feel the hairs of her neck standing up when she is watched. To get the action started, a film needs characters to do a certain amount of stupid, but there is a difference between stupid and no woman would ever do this. I am willing to let it go because he nails the fierceness of female friendship though Harper’s best friend, Riley (Gayle Rankin), makes one suggestion that also defies logic.
Garland borrows a page from Ari Aster’s unflinching horror playbook to culminate his trilogy on the battle of the sexes. In each of his films, that war poisons relationships then leaves the protagonist processing the fallout and trying to fix what is already broken. “Men” is his most abstract work to date. It is another example of expressionist horror, which depicts real life fears such as racism in “Master” (2022) and aging in “Relic” (2020) as if they are supernatural so viewers can become submerged in the protagonist’s subjective horror. If you were not into those movies, you will not like Garland’s latest, but even if you were, it is the weakest of the three.
“Men” is a meditation of grief and guilt in the face of misogyny.
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“Men” toggles between the past, the moment when she broke up with her husband, and the present in Gloucester. Harper’s husband, James (Paapa Essiedu), curses her with the responsibility of his suicide if she divorces him, which is a form of domestic abuse. She witnesses his suicide –cue tasteless joke about it raining men—and the aftermath, which haunts her literally throughout the film. Harper confides all the horrors that she experiences on holiday, but never mentions that all the men in the town lookalike because they do not. If there are men, her grief and their behavior have colored the way that she sees them. The two other women characters retain their individual features.
“Men” is Garland’s way of saying #allmen. They just differ in their degree of insanity, but the spectrum goes from seemingly harmless but odd Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear) to a naked guy following her. It is as if her husband’s violence made her more susceptible to the demonic forces of sexism. Harper cannot live her life without a man disrupting it or projecting his desires on her. While some of these events are happening in the real world—there was a naked man thus the texted photograph, Harper is not a reliable narrator. The sensational events begin to resemble her husband’s distorted body after his death. There is a Russian nesting doll birthing sequence to symbolize that their relationship bore grotesque, unnatural fruit, which ends with a reveal that Riley is pregnant. By the end of the film, Harper is forced to finally stop running away from her grief and face her husband’s death so she can be free of his curse, which she succeeds in doing. Like “Annihilation,” the only way for the couple to coexist is if at least one of them does not. Like the creation in “Ex Machina,” Harper cannot be free without destroying James—as implied with Chekhov’s ax, but occurs off screen. Garland, are you ok? How are your relationships?
I am unfamiliar with the imagery of the pagan holy water font in “Men.” I hope that some enterprising YouTuber explores the imagery of the film. Reminiscent to the Comedy/Thalia and Tragedy/Melpomene masks that were worn in ancient Greek drama, the Green Man appears on one side and the Sheela na-gig on the other, less visible side. Harper goes to a church when she believes that danger has passed. She sees one side of the font, which has a man’s face, but she never sees the other side, which has a woman with her genitalia exposed. This imagery feels like a grotesque mockery of yin and yang. It implies that Harper is forced into playing a role of woman, which explains the vagina dentata imagery—the tunnel, the letter box. All the men blame Harper for their actions and the consequences of their actions. Since all the men wear Rory Kinnear’s face, the font evoking a mask feels intentional, especially since soon thereafter, a mask of a woman appears. Message! Later the naked stalker decorates his face or transforms to appear like the Green Man.
I was left uncomfortable with the use of race in “Men.” James is a black man yet Kinnear is the face of misogyny. While misogyny is universal and knows no race, it did feel dissonant that the face that she sees everywhere was not her husband, but a random dude with zero significance to Harper. I can buy that Harper’s subjective, sinister view of men is not obvious to her as a psychological effect of surviving domestic violence, and she is only ready to process that experience by the end of the film; thus James’ anti-birth, but it did not quite work for me. Garland cannot make every sinister male face into James’ face because then the film has black men terrorizing a white woman, which sends an entirely different, racist message, but I needed some significance to this universal face. It should have been the first man that she saw after James’ death who was a creep. Maybe the film is implying that Geoffrey was such a person thus the apple imagery, but we never witness Harper catching Geoffrey’s opening disapproving look. The film is subjective, but I needed a little more internal logic. Is her subjective view coloring what she does not see as well?
“Men” is a gorgeous movie that could fall flat if people find humor in Garland’s vision. The film is well-acted and characteristic of Garland’s bleak view of human relationships, but it ends on an upbeat note of hope and recovery that he denied his prior protagonists. In a world without men, Garland suggests that life can go on.
