Film Review – Men (2022)

The countryside is the lushest of greens, the picture postcard village built from warm Cotswold stone and the locals ….. well, they all have a familiar look. Despite that idyllic setting, Alex Garland’s Men gets off to a less than peaceful start and it clearly isn’t going to calm down.

When we first meet Harper (Jessie Buckley), she’s in her immaculate London apartment and is clearly on edge. Why else would she have a reflex reaction to the first strains of the soundtrack? The story concentrates on her retreat to a country manor house which she has all to herself in an effort to find peace and healing after the sudden death of her ex-husband. The property is owned by Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear) who, despite being awkward with other people, seems decent enough. But Harper is soon overwhelmed by a general feeling of malevolence, that she’s being stalked and is ultimately under attack. Is it reality, or a reflection of her trauma?

Men doesn’t have the feel of an Alex Garland film. The discomfort and horror are all there, but the inclusion of the religious and the pagan has a distinct whiff of Ari Aster’s Midsommar. One of the locals, a strange nude man who appears to Harper in the woods, increasingly becomes the Green Man of folklore, echoed by the font in the church with its pagan design. But here religion feels off kilter, with paganism in the ascendancy. The vicar (Rory Kinnear again) is detached and close to sinister and the cross in the background of his main scene isn’t upright and proud, but lying on its side. It’s not the first time we’re shown this image.

What Garland really has on his mind is toxic masculinity. All those micro-aggressions directed at women that are so commonplace they hardly notice them. Harper’s reports of being stalked by a stranger aren’t taken seriously, nearly dismissed out of hand, not just by the local policeman but just about everybody else she talks to. In the same way, when she talks to the vicar about her ex’s death, it’s not long before he implies that she was responsible. All the people she talks to are men, and they’re all played by Kinnear. It’s something of a virtuoso performance, creating a number of individual and distinct characters, but at no point is there ever a flicker of recognition from Harper that they are all strikingly similar. What’s meant to be a device to ramp up the tension comes across as closer to a piece of whimsy and comes dangerously close to being a distraction.

That’s not to say that Men doesn’t know how to hold on to its audience. The combined talents of Kinnear and Buckley who, as ever, is emotional and compelling, together with the inevitable compulsion to try to understand what exactly is going on, keep you gripped and, at times, uncomfortable. It all leads up to a climax which is gruesomely graphic and surprisingly predictable. While it’s clear what Garland has to say, the film feels like he was torn between two approaches and decided to weld them together. But it’s an awkward fit and, despite that compulsion to watch, there’s the sense that the director has taken on just a bit too much.

★★ 1/2

Drama | Cert: 15 | UK cinemas from 1 June 2022 | Entertainment Film Distributors | Dir. Alex Garland | Jessie Buckley, Rory Kinnear, Paapa Essiedu, Gayle Rankin.

Watch our exclusive interview with Jessie Buckley and Rory Kinnear.