Men

Men

Writer & Director – Alex Garland

2022, UK

Stars – Jessie Buckley, Rory Kinnear, Paapa Essiedu

 

 

(You should not read this if you haven’t seen the film.)

 

The first thing noted is the issue of a man writing with this focus on the female experience of misogyny. A theme of Garland’s ‘Ex Machina’ was male objectification of a woman and the object turning the tables, so there’s precedent for this writer-director’s interest in gender issues. In the pro camp, ‘Men’ is a good film that carries its premise to the end, where its symbolism, eccentricities and outrageousness have meaning. In the con camp, he’s taking up valuable space that should be taken by women filmmakers; does he have the right? So Garland’s privilege as male filmmaker goes to mitigate ‘Men’s status as a successful provocation on behalf of female issues.

 

Attending horror film festivals, I have noted a welcome and inventive rise in films that centre unapologetically on the female experience: Bea Grant is one to watch (‘12 Hour Shift’, and especially ‘Lucky’), and Emerald Fennel’s ‘Promising Young Woman’, Natalie Erika Jones’ ‘Relic’, and of course Julia Ducournau’s ‘Raw’ and Emerald Fennel’s ‘Promising Young Woman’; and I was also mildy entertained but not convinced by Coralie Fargeat’s ‘Revenge’. So these voices are out there, but underheard and not quite in the mainstream. (I’m thinking of Kitty Green’s ‘The Assistant’ too.)

 

But it seems that even detractors are inclined to credit the atmosphere and the aesthetic of ‘Men’. The set piece where Harper’s (Jessie Buckley) innocuous walk the woods gets creepier and creepier, where she seemingly summons something when singing down a tunnel, is just one early highpoint. And then there’s the excellent performances of Rory Kinear, covering a wide spectrum of men. Kinear steps one step back from the caricature – broad but subtle – so the point about male modes doesn’t stumble into reductive stereotypes. It’s all coached in a near fairy-tale aesthetic (forbidden fruit and all that; but dandelion blowing verges on the trite), turning a small corner of an English village into an area where reality can’t be trusted.

 

This is the tale of a woman who thinks she is coping with the traumatic end to an abusive relationship, but when she gets away to a country cottage as a part of her recovery, the memory of her partner influences and infects every male she meets (men: they’re all the same). This memory makes all her interactions with men increasingly toxic and violent, culminating in excessive body-horror. It’s all there in the tagline: “What haunts you will find you.” If the outré ending baffles those that aren’t used to the language of genre extremes – ‘The Thing’, ‘Society’, ‘The Special’, early Cronenberg – it is a provocative body-horror metaphor of regurgitating/rebirthing misogyny across the ages and types of masculinity. It’s the kind of WTF moment that amuses the hell out of my inner horror fan, visceral and cathartic, unsettling, brutal. (I went in with no idea of where it would be going, or exactly what it would be intending, and I credit the trailer for being that rare example of fuelling my curiosity whilst keeping the mystery. Hence, I was fully and pleasingly surprised.)

But what I liked, in the middle of the rebirthing set-piece, is how Harper eventually just looked and walked away, as if to say, “I have no time for your showing-off, guy.” All the way through, it’s evident that she is no fool for the passive-aggressive abuse of men. She wastes no time in rejecting it or calling it out, even if she got herself into a bad situation in the first place. Nevertheless, this whole fantasia reveals that she isn’t coping as well as she thinks, and Harper is ultimately left on the sofa with the aggressive haunting of her ex-boyfriend asking if he she still loves him, after everything. It’s a tale of working through trauma.

 

It is then arguably not so much that Garland is stepping on the toes of the experience of female artists, but that he is using his platform to criticise his own gender. ‘Men’ doesn’t stop the film to explain, as does the otherwise wonderful ‘Get Out’, but neither is it as ambiguous as some credit it. Yet, for all its conclusive meaning, ‘Men’ echoed in me the broader satisfaction with confronting gender issues that I got from ‘The Special’, rather than the troubling aftertaste of sorrow from Bea Grant’s ‘Lucky’ or ‘Promising Young Female’, or even ‘The Beta Test’. As ‘The Special’ and ‘The Beta Test’ are evidently critical of the misogyny from male artists, from the inside as it were, these are surely more appropriate peers. And I count ‘Ex machina’ in this camp too. The difference is that ‘Men’ has a female avatar. That is to say that for all its dreamy veneer of trickery and profundity, it works best as a slow-burn visceral portrayal of one woman’s trauma, and in that sense it’s more akin to the broad end of b-movie expressions of the genre. And that can possess a cathartic and horror-hilarious quality that succeeds where other genres can’t.