There are few creatives out there right now like Alex Garland. Responsible for movies like Ex Machina and Annihilation, Garland brings us his third directorial feature with Men, and it is quite the addition to his already stacked filmography. But Men also isn’t for the faint of heart and will be an interesting journey into our own collective psyche as we get more reactions from the latest Garland flick. There is one thing to say about Men, though: Rory Kinnear sure as hell knows how to play a terrifying man.
**Spoilers for Alex Garland’s Men lie ahead.**
Alex Garland’s Men asks us the simple, highly relatable question of “What if men traumatized others and then blamed those they hurt for their own issues?” A film that both terrified me for my own fear of being alone in a big house as well as my fear of walking alone at night, it’s an exploration of Harper’s (Jessie Buckley) trauma over the death of her husband, James, played by Paapa Essiedu.
Her way of coping is to take a two-week vacation into a small country town where she meets a parade of men, all ranging in their reactions to Harper and her situation, and all played by Rory Kinnear. The basic plot of Men is just Harper unpacking her own pain and upset over her relationship with James and the unresolved agony in her from James’ death and the blame put onto her by him.
That manifests in a series of Rory Kinnears haunting her waking moments and blaming her consistently for their own issues, the most glaring of them being when the Vicar puts his own temptations on Harper and blames her for the “power” she has over him. It’s hard to watch, not just because it’s Garland’s signature style that leaves you uneasy as you’re watching the story unfold, but because it also (for me at least) brought up a lot of my own fears about existing in this world as a woman. There were multiple times when I watched Harper walk around at night alone, and I thought about how I never would.
There’s imagery in this movie that will stay with me for a while and plague my mind, like Rory Kinnear giving birth to different versions of himself over and over again until he becomes James, who tells Harper yet again about how this is all her fault.
But even with the stylistic choices and the beautiful cinematography of this movie, I was left constantly feeling dread for what was to come. I was luckily wrong in my predictions for Harper and the movie as a whole but it is definitely one that feels like a second watch would be beneficial now that my initial fear and worry isn’t as important. Still, I do feel like this is a movie that is, sadly, going to feel like a universal experience. I often fear windows at night for who is looking in and Garland loves to include that imagery in this movie.
The hardest thing to unpack is the constant blame. To her credit, Harper is fighting the urge to take on the sins of the men in her life and not internalize them. But watching the movie is a constant reminder that this is the world we live in. Women are constantly put as the issue when we’re simply existing. The Vicar scene is the one that really drives home the core message of Garland’s Men in that he puts his own struggles with his own sexual repression onto Harper. Ashes to blame even though she’s done nothing to entice him.
Much is the way with artists like Garland, there were moments in this movie where I said “Alex” out loud in the screening room. Primarily when there’s a knife and a mailbox. Second only to the series of Rory Kinnears at the end.The only real saving grace that Harper has is her friend Riley (Gayle Rankin) throughout the movie who keeps trying to contact her and help her through this pain and it’s fascinating how the three women in the film all exists within the “men” of both the small country village and the dynamic between James and Harper.
It’s gross, gory, hard to watch, and a movie that forces you to think of the pain that so many women are burdened with. It’s a movie that I will inevitably think about for quite a while, much like the rest of Garland’s work, but it also is going to be an interesting journey as more and more people see it.
Garland gives us yet another boundary pushing exploration of self, the mind, and society. Just maybe go into Men on an empty stomach and…not at 10 in the morning.
(featured image: A24)
