MOVIE REVIEW: Men (2022)

Men, written and directed by Alex Garland, starring Jessie Buckley and Rory Kinnear.

I highly enjoyed Alex Garland's previous two movies, Ex Machina and Annihilation, moody science fiction films with a dash of surrealism (well, a lot more than a dash with Annihilation, but we'll get into that). So I was quite excited when I saw the first trailer for Men, his foray into horror. So did it live up to my expectations? Well...yes and no.

Men is about Harper Marlow (Jessie Buckley), who decides to go on a vacation in a quant English village in the countryside after the death of her husband. The slow details of how and why he died are intriguing, but it's the current day events that make the most interesting parts of the film. After checking in with Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear), the man renting her the country house, she goes on a walk in the woods and ends up not just being chased by an unknown figure, but witnessing a naked man covered in leaves who then follows her back to her house. The slow, dreadful buildup as she wanders through the woods and finds a disused railway tunnel, the gnawing fear of what the naked man might do, these things all make some good uneasy horror. It gets even worse as she finds herself meeting a priest (also Rory Kinnear) and a rude little boy (also Rory Kinnear) and we, the audience, know this place is off. The surreal is here and, as the climax rushes forward, it just ramps up the surreality of things.

This isn't a bad thing, mind you. I love a good David Lynch movie -- INLAND EMPIRE is surreal from beginning to end. The dreamlike atmosphere makes the movie into a fever dream, different places connecting where they shouldn't, people showing up where they shouldn't, faces becoming nightmarish, everything only connected by dream logic.

The climax to Men, on the other hand, is similar to the climax to Annihilation: it takes the central metaphor of the film and ramps it up. In Annihilation's case, it works wonderfully, because the metaphor and the logic of the film work hand in hand. In the case of Men, it doesn't work quite as well. As soon as the film turns into Oops! All Metaphors, we, the audience, are left wondering if anything we see is actually real or all in her head. And then, in the very last scene, we are shown definitive proof that at least some things were completely real. This ambiguity may not be a bad thing -- I don't need everything explained to me -- but in this film it becomes a bit frustrating. It leaves me wanting more -- not a straight up explanation, like one of those "Endings Explained!" YouTube videos -- but more hints at how the central metaphor connects to the overall logic of the film and the film's antagonist and how that connects to the English countryside and the folkloric myth of the Green Man.

In the end, however, Men was an unsettling horror film that just makes me want more from Alex Garland.