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After her husband, James (Paapa Essiedu), dies of an apparent suicide right in front of her, Harper (Jessie Buckley) heads off on a solo holiday to a small English village for much-needed peace and tranquillity. While there, though, she starts to be harassed by a group of increasingly horrible men (all played by Rory Kinnear), and she is forced to confront both what brought her there and whether or not she's slowly and surely losing her mind.
Men was actually released last year in cinemas worldwide, but it proved too much for local distributors (and not unfairly so). So after being unceremoniously dumped on a few VOD services, it has finally shown up on Prime Video – that oft-neglected streaming service that actually has by far the best selection of movies of any of them.
The brainchild of Alex Garland, who has made a career out of first writing (Never Let Me Go, The Beach, Sunshine, Dredd) and then writing and directing (Ex Machina, Annihilation) a string of brilliant and frequently challenging genre films, Men is unquestionably his most audacious, difficult and disturbing film to date, by, like, a country mile.
An exercise in surrealism, psychological horror and layers upon layers of metaphor, Men fits right in alongside the likes of Darren Aronofsky's Mother! and David Lowery's The Green Knight (also released straight to Prime Video and actually sharing some mythological touchstones with Men), even if it's not actually as good as either of them. It is, most assuredly, not an easy watch, and its audience is decidedly limited, but for all that, I'm not sure it entirely works, and that its feminist themes might be a bit basic, even misandrist in nature, it's still worth checking out if visceral, unhinged and surreal cinema is your cup of tea.
The first two-thirds, in particular, before it goes completely deranged and starts incorporating Cronenberg-esque body horror, are a textbook example of building psychological horror as our already emotionally fragile heroine is confronted with a naked, possibly dead, stalker; a cruelly callous priest; a hateful young boy; and a dismissive, quietly threatening police officer, all wearing the same face.
Even before the film goes fully berserk with the clearly supernatural mayhem of its final act, there's something deeply uncanny about the world that Harper finds herself in. From the over-saturated greens of the English countryside to the fact that every man she meets in the village (apparently, there are no women there at all) wears the same face – even, most creepily, the vicious young boy she meets outside a church – to the emotionally raw and finally horrific visions of her abusive dead husband, the only things that ground any of it to concrete reality are the video calls Harper has with her supportive friend, Riley (Gayle Rankin).
It's also hard to miss the obvious symbolism of the ever-present apple tree in the centre of this Eden. Or the way her naked stalker bears a resemblance to a dead-eyed Adam and an inhuman serpent at the same time before taking on the ultimate appearance of the mythological Green Man – an archetype in English mythology representing rebirth that is drawn from the same Biblical story of Adam and Eve.
Jessie Buckley is typically fantastic as Harper as she finds the perfect pitch between Harper's grief-stricken emotional rawness and the ambiguity of her mental state. Has she stumbled into a supernatural realm? Has she gone insane? Is her brain tapping into Jungian archetypes to help heal her grief-stricken psyche? There are no clear answers there; no less impressive is Kinnear, as the many faces of toxic masculinity, who manages to make all the men he plays both distinct entities and a single, malicious being.
Along with these faultless performances, there's no denying Garland's control of the material in the first two acts nor the sense that he purposely relinquishes control in the third as he allows the mounting tension to play out in increasingly unhinged and sometimes absurd ways. It's incredibly compelling stuff all the way through; even that final act is as likely to elicit laughs as it is scary. It's fantastically pretentious but also emotionally effective.
The biggest question, though, is just what the film is actually about. The most obvious and least inspiring answer is that it is a feminist nightmare. From the blatant displays of toxic masculinity to the Biblical imagery of Eve and, perhaps, Lilith (known as Adam's first wife who, crucially, was rejected by him as she was created as his equal) to the climax that involves, in a more literal sense that you might possibly want or expect, each kind of man birthing the next, everything about the film points towards it being a particularly reductive and ugly version of feminism where men are all monsters, and women are their perennial victims.
This is the obvious reading of the film, and it's rather surprising considering that the film was written, directed and produced by a man. And if that's all the film is about, then, well, it's a whole lot more banal and a lot less smart than it thinks it is.
Far more interesting is the idea that Men is less about men vs women, in general, and more about a particular woman trying to come to terms with the death of her husband: a man shown to be psychologically manipulative and, in at least one situation, physically abusive, who she is about to divorce when he dies a sudden, violent death right in front of her. From this angle, the obvious symbolism becomes (slightly) less obvious, and these symbols become something akin to Jungian archetypes that Harper needs to confront and, where necessary, defeat in order to start living again.
Most likely, it's probably a mix of the two, which is pretty emblematic of the film itself: it is, very decidedly, a mixed bag, with genius rubbing shoulders with stupidity; profundity with banality; subtlety with obviousness; emotional rawness with silliness. It's a film that swings for the fences, and sometimes it knocks it out of the park, and sometimes it ends up whacking itself in the face with a baseball bat – but at least it has the courage to take the swing.
WATCH THE TRAILER HERE:
