Men: Alex Garland's Countryside Horror Amps the Woman-in-Peril Scenario to Deranged
By Karen Gordon
Rating: A
Women, men, relationships, the patriarchy feminism, nature, and body-horror merge in writer/director Alex Garland’s creepy, allegorical art-house horror thriller Men.
Jessie Buckley is Harper, whose husband James (Paapa Essiedu) has just died. To grieve and restore herself she’s rented a beautiful manor house in the lush English countryside for a few weeks.
As the unctuous owner Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear) notes as he shows her around, it’s isolated enough for privacy, but just a ten minute walk from the small local village that has a pub and a church, and his place, of course. The grounds are beautiful and the countryside bucolic enough to appear to be restorative.
Jessie Buckley’s Harper is about to bite off more trouble than expected in the quiet countryside.
But this is Alex Garland’s world. Nature is restorative, until it’s not.
Harper’s first happy walk in the country comes to an abrupt end when she sees a man at a bit of a distance who appears to suddenly be running towards her at speed. She runs through the woods. On her way out, she snaps a picture of a picturesque old farmhouse, on her phone. When she checks the photo, she sees that a fully naked man is standing in front of the house, staring at her. More reasons for her to get back to her rental, asap.
The naked man is not a mirage, and soon shows up at the house. He’s just one of several local men she encounters, who get progressively stranger.
Men is tense, and creepy. But underneath the creepiness, the unpredictable plot and the body horror, it’s also astute as hell about the dynamics that have evolved between men and women.
Of course, not all men. But, in the same way that, Jordan Peele’s satirical horror Get Out looked at how racial stereotypes have bled into the culture at large, Men also looks at ways in which certain attitudes towards women have become woven into the collective consciousness. I’m trying to avoid using the term ‘toxic masculinity’ here, partly because the movie is much more interesting and fun, and, well Freudian/Jungian. But for sure, Men is in that ballpark.
The film also gets at how interactions can feel different for women. I’m not speaking on behalf of all women here, but, from my experience, Garland is pretty damned astute.
I don’t know why I’ve never noticed this before seeing Men, but thinking about the movie on the way out of the theatre, I realized that Garland has been making films and TV about women and the roles and attitudes imposed on them, since he started his directing career.
Ex Machina, Annihilation, the TV series Devs, all are built around female protagonists and, (in many ways challenging male perceptions). I’d thought his directorial debut, 2014’s Ex Machina, as being about the tension between the two male leads. But in retrospect, while the two men are trying to figure each other out in a classic power struggle, the film’s cool center is held by the AI Ava (Alicia Vikander), who in the end, turns their expectations of who she is against them and to her favour.
Annihilation (2018) is about a team of female scientists sent out to solve a terrifying mystery. Devs (2020), focuses on a computer engineer taking it upon herself to investigate her boyfriend’s mysterious disappearance in his highly secretive company.
Garland has an impeccable eye for casting. The film has a very small cast, all of whom are excellent. The heavy lifting, though is done by two fine, fine actors: Buckley, who may be rattled, but is no ‘female in distress.’ And British actor Rory Kinnear - perhaps best known for his role as Frankenstein’s Monster in Penny Dreadful, and Tanner in the last few Bond movies - who plays almost all the male characters. It’s early yet, and this is a small, horror movie, but you might see his name especially at awards time, for what it’s worth.
Another mark of a Garland film is that he sets his films, which are mostly sci-fi, and now horror, in natural settings. Ex Machina and Devs, both feature top secret buildings, high designed concrete bunkers, built outside of the city in wilderness settings. Annihilation is set in a forest. Nature offers something beautiful, ancient and enduring. But in Garland’s films, what starts out as beauty can become hostile or alienating.
In Men, the countryside that is so beautiful and initially restorative, becomes unsafe, thanks mostly to the human characters, and whatever-the-hell supernatural forces drive them.
When Harper arrives at the house she’s renting, she sees a beautiful apple tree, plucks one and takes a bit bite. Garland is biting into one of the oldest tropes about men and women. We’ve been warned.
Men. Written and directed by Alex Garland. Starring Jessie Buckley, Rory Kinnear, and Papa Essiedu. Opens in theatres May 20.