There comes a moment early on in Alex Garland’s Men that will likely stand as a litmus test for whether or not the viewer will actively enjoy the experience of watching it. It happens right after Harper (Jessie Buckley), a “writer” looking to escape the city life after her husband’s death (accidental or otherwise, who knows), arrives at the beautiful countryside estate that she plans on staying at for a few weeks to recuperate. She discovers an apple tree, bearing plentiful fruit, in the garden outside the home, and plucks a large one from the branches, taking a bite. She’s interrupted by the caretaker, Geoffery (Rory Kinnear), and is scolded for snatching one up without asking – though he soon reveals he’s only “kidding.” If you’re the kind of person who’s entranced enough by the atmospherics to put aside the hoary nature of that metaphor, well, you might stand a decent chance of making it through Men while having a reasonable amount of thought-provoking fun. No judgment implied there either, and good for you if you do. If you’re like me, though, your head will instantly fall into your hands and you’ll wonder exactly what the hell you did to wind up in this theater. Men basically operates on that level of allegory, a slight aesthetic exercise from an otherwise fascinating creator of complex and intriguing works.
Moreover, it’s depressingly on-brand for the whole of “elevated horror,” the backhanded compliment of genre efforts in the arthouse world, which has slowly accumulated its own set of conventions despite all of the rhetorical posturing meant to separate it from the unwashed masses of low-minded entertainment. Of course, there’s something intangibly wrong with the rural setting, where it seems that all the men inhabiting its borders are born from the same suspicious stock (and Garland, of course, never dips his toes into the thornier aspects of the contra-class comparison between Buckley’s city girl and the town’s inhabitants). Of course, there’s a hefty amount of trauma, which the film looks to provide a gory catharsis for despite only ever managing a glancing blow at attempting to understand it or process it in any sense beyond the surface. Of course, there are suggestions as to what might be going on behind the scenes, open-ended and vague as to provide the viewer with any number of ideas as to what might be happening here so that they can do the heavy lifting of ascribing meaning to these images and events in lieu of authorial intent. And, of course, it’s all rather precious and restrained in its attempts to shock or scare the viewer, composed and prim in proper fashion, far and away from any measure of spontaneity or life. Its title is the most inflammatory thing about it: had it been called The Men in the Woods, no one would care, but the bluntness of Men implies a generalization that the film is only ever able to fleetingly grasp at.
Most of this error falls on Garland’s script. As a screenwriter, Garland’s work falls into two distinct categories: his original concepts and his adaptations. The former, of course, is where the emphasis typically lies when it comes to his critical reception. He’s been extensively praised as an ideas-forward storyteller, which overrates his talents in that department – remember the legions of complaints about 28 Days Later and Sunshine (both of which are films that owe a great deal to specific genre influences, almost to the point of being adaptations themselves) around the time of their release? – while subsequently neglecting his vast skill when it comes to writing compelling characters, scenes, and narratives. His adaptations are where his talents show themselves at their best, with his last three adapted screenplays (Never Let Me Go, Dredd, and Annihilation) being among the best released in the past decade of genre cinema and perhaps even within the whole of filmmaking itself.
Watching something like Men it becomes even clearer: No matter what Garland himself does to the contents of the work he’s adapting, the fact that there is a structure imposed on the narrative by an external force, be it the whims of the attached director of the project or in attempting to preserve the feel, much less any specific scenes from the source, seems to give him an uncanny focus on the things that matter in making entertaining and intriguing stories that work for the screen. Without that backbone, his films can feel like they’re searching for a thematic substance that eludes them, where the suggestion of provocation – i.e., raising a question and expecting to be praised just for the asking rather than any concrete exploration of its possible answers — becomes more important than, you know, actually being provocative.
Part of this hesitance may stem from the practical needs of the project, as, barring the studio-financed Annihilation, Garland’s two wholly original concept films are character-centric small-scale affairs, typically set in a single isolated location. The locales of the countryside hamlet that Buckley wanders in Men are functionally the same as the rooms in Oscar Isaac’s mansion/compound in Ex Machina, as it’s the sparse nature of both that ultimately defines them as places. They’re manicured environments, dollhouses of chaos nestled within quiet and comfortable forests, with few of the distinguishing features that help other “elevated” horror films from A24 and its ilk become memorable to audiences and critics alike. Even Ari Aster, the patron saint of saying as little as possible and hoping the heaping servings of style he’s cramming into your eyes and ears like Satan force-feeding Homer Simpson donuts in hell will eventually sate your desire for gory thrills and little else, has managed to expand his scope in a more interesting way. I hated Midsommar, but it was a step up in terms of ambition from the precious tragedies of Hereditary: A larger cast and a broader and more varied aesthetic at least helped to conceal that he was still dealing with the same “one’s trauma can eventually give way to healing as long as one is willing to lose themselves in the pursuit of finding a new family” bullshit. Garland’s doing the same thing, though this time he’s just made it abstract to the point of meaninglessness as if he decided that his handicap for this match would be to forgo all the aspects that made his prior creative output successful.
Based on Annihilation, which was any metric a work with a copious amount of panache, one might assume that this would be a net benefit. But, again, Jeff Vandermeer’s novel did a lot of the thematic heavy lifting, even if Garland did make a series of alterations to the narrative in order to give it life on the screen. As such, Men feels like an assemblage of occasionally interesting images without any underlying ethos or grander meaning to unite them into a coherent whole. His suggestions of a “folk horror” origin to Buckley’s nightmare are lacking because of this particular sparseness: it is easy enough to suggest a grander design to the madness (and I’m not advocating that he scream at the audience a whole host of exposition), but it becomes fundamentally frustrating when all Garland does is point at a statue and try to nudge the viewer to a conclusion.
The same goes for Buckley’s characterization, which is wispy as it is formulaic in its attempts to define her through the “trauma” that she has endured at the hands of her husband, and it stunts any growth for psychological reasoning of her experiences in the town: she’s a series of traits combined in a test tube rather than a functional character, and I wished I’d been able to understand her history beyond her recent past. Perhaps a more functional version of Men would have pulled from a more whole understanding of her relationships because solely defining her in the context of her husband and his tragedy inherently limits where Garland can go with it as a portrait. What was her father like? Does she have any brothers? Close male friends? Each of these details might have added additional and complex shading to a fundamentally monochrome portrait as if she were a paint-by-numbers template and Garland only had a single shade of green left over on his palette.
Yet what does work in Men can be intoxicating. Rory Kinnear’s work here is on another level, and despite being forced into an Anomalisa-esque box of having to portray every dumpy fuckhead in this village, he manages to make most of the performances sing: his creepy priest, which feels like a pseudo-shot at the hot one in Fleabag, is compelling, as well as the goofy owner of the estate, whose garish grin is the single defining feature of the film, if one were to believe the marketing. It’s strange how he, in that latter role, is perhaps the most fully-formed character amongst the bunch, with hints at a past full of pastoral sadness underwriting his initial charm and belying the evil that will come later on. The only one of Kinnear’s characters that doesn’t work is the schoolboy he plays, where the uncanny valley elements of the digital de-aging tech surpass their intended creepiness and wind up in an outright goofy territory. Then again, Garland’s probably not hoping for the spiteful laughter that emerged in my screening when Kinnear’s truly mythological form begins stalking Buckley in the forest: Stark-naked, lingering in the background of the estate she’s staying at.
Yet at least that builds to something intriguing: A gore-filled literal Matryoshka doll climax of Cronenbergian proportions that might have had more impact had it been in a movie with a stronger psychological sense of self. As it stands, it’ll make for perfect fodder for fucked-up horror clip compilations on YouTube in a few years, free of the 90-odd minutes of padding that it takes for Men to get there.