Men (dir. Alex Garland, 2022)- Review

“I didn't want it to feel like a gimmick,” fretted Rory Kinnear of the “nine or ten” different characters he plays in Alex Garland’s latest horror, Men. “I don't want it to become an acting exercise or virtuoso kind of thing.” Such hand-wringing earnestness is what makes Kinnear such a perfect foil to his co-star, indie darling Jessie Buckley, in what could otherwise be another stodgy serving of A24 ‘folk-woke’.

The characters are Kinnear’s babies. His babies, really, with Garland: the star and the writer-director quite literally created them together, bringing a depth of personal understanding, and perhaps unintended irony, to the titular subject- and a well-intentioned yet insanely childish attempt to tackle gender politics. Men is a film about, as Buckley’s character says, “a very, very specific type of man”: English ones. Some just want to help; some are threatening; at the end of the day, all of them are useless, overgrown babies that just keep crawling out of the (literal) woodwork. Kinnear is enough of an actor to worry about slipping into gimmickry in a way which actually adds value to the finished product- salvaging a screenplay that sometimes descends into colour-by-numbers Freudian symbolism.

To unpack the folk-woke thesis a little: ever since The Witch, Midsommar, The Lighthouse et al, A24 in particular have been mining a juicy seam of escapist fantasy settings with a gender-politics twist. They are delightful. They also tap into the commercial appeal of the digitally broadcast ‘feminine urge’ to -insert meme-, usually some kind of howling rejection of modernity, capitalism, the patriarchy, or just “the feminine urge to spend £3 on a silly little latte every time you step outside”. This universal impulse- which quite literally birthed, appropriately, a ‘masculine urge’ successor meme- usually manifests as mindless carnal screeching, resisting interpretation. Men pushes the formula to its extremes, with the sledgehammer-subtle message. Setting out its feminist horror stall with the greatest goodwill- following Harper Marlowe (Buckley), as a recent widow taking refuge in a country house- the film finds a leg buckling under the weight of a domestic violence topic.

Ah, the nuances of modern womanhood: suicide; mental illness; sexual assault; ooh, and not just an ambiguously abusive relationship, but a mixed race one. Garland’s concept, goggling up at the scale of its themes just as Buckley’s character does under the vastness of the cosmos, obviously fails to offer any actual concrete interpretations. This trend is getting a bit tiresome. Fortunately, fortunately, the performances are enough to pull off the aim of personal interpretation and pondering- but that burden often falls to Buckley.

Several of the characters genuinely convey the unsettling, familiar horror of ‘English men’ (whatever one might take that to mean). Others, though, look like this:

I mean, come on. The film’s ultimate message about men- their unknowable nature! their simultaneously infantile and malicious nature! it’s not their fault! it is their fault!- seems to echo through the production design.

Other attempts at deep, transcendental symbolism sag into the visuals of an ad for hay fever medication or Viagra. The cartoonish crunch of the apple which Harper plucks off the tree has about as much symbolic heft as the Desperate Housewives credits. The Marilyn Monroe-esque, standard issue ‘creepy child’ mask, rubbed on a dead bird in some kind of half-hearted, squeaky act of supernatural lechery, rings similarly hollow.

In some ways this is a shame, apparently detracting from the really excellent characters in Kinnear-Garland’s joint repertoire. Tired pantomime villains like the creepy priest, who sprouts a lobster claw while mumbling into Harper’s crotch, seem too camp, too fantastical; no one more than the policeman, first dismissing her reports of a stalker and then attacking her by the car. Both of these- particularly with an Irish woman, who the film makes an aggressive effort to root in modern London- feel too close to reality. But perhaps that’s the point.