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Language: English
Jesse Buckley fights to end things in Alex Garland’s psycho noir that is heavily allegorical, slathering morbid symbolism on a simple tale of a broken relationship between a couple struggling to wean themselves off each other. Alex Garland, the punk director behind the techno dystopian Ex Machina and the enviro sci-fi horror Netflix movie Annihilation, is back with a twisty tale that starts beguilingly enough but spirals gradually into an off-the-rails, bafflingly surreal rollercoaster ride.
Screening at the Cannes Film Festival in the Directors’ Fortnight, a sidebar section of the film festival - and simultaneously opening in theatres - Men is distributed by A24, the indie company known for their association with Garland’s Ex Machina. Ex Machina infused techno-realism into its tale by making its humanoid robot relatable. Men is far more grounded but Garland deploys twisted psychoanalytic machinations to take the tale to the roots of humanity and childbirth, leaving its bizarre ending wide open to interpretation/misinterpretation.
Jessy Buckley plays Harper, who is on a trip to the English countryside to take a break from her work and grief. In arresting visuals tinted with yellow afterglow, we get the backstory of Harper’s grief. She sought a divorce from her husband who, in turn, threatened to kill himself if she followed through with the divorce. In the ensuing argument, her husband James, played by Paapa Essiedu, ends up hitting her, gets thrown out of the house by Harper and kills himself by leaping off the top floor neighbour’s balcony.
Harper is ridden with guilt - something James promised she would be - but in trying to deal with her existential grief, she goes on a holiday. The movie opens with lighthearted scenes of Harper checking into the holiday house with a guide by the irreverent landlord but that tone soon changes.
When she explores the countryside by going on walks into the neighbouring woods, Harper starts seeing men stalking her. One of them is naked in her front yard under the apple tree, another is a vicar in the village church, there is a creepy grown-up kid who wants to play hide and seek with her and the landlord of Harper’s rental seems overbearingly friendly.
It doesn’t take long for her to realise that all these people are the same person, played to startlingly brilliant effect by Rory Kinnear. She’s stuck in an existential dread that seems to replicate on its own in the form of creepy men, what’s even worse, nobody believes her version of the events.
At the risk of stating the obvious, Jessy Buckley as Harper has an effervescent screen presence that she uses to handhold the viewer along on this somewhat bumpy ride.
There’s a strong undercurrent of something deeply psychological in the narrative right from the beginning, so when Harper goes on a walk under rain-washed trees on muddy forest paths, one is waiting for her to stumble upon something sinister.
She does, her first of those strange men sightings occur on the edge of a forest - a naked man appears on the horizon, only to subsequently be found in her lawn, he’s arrested by the cops but let go of, frustratingly enough for her. Garland wants the viewer to question the meaning of these mysterious sightings, without offering much by way of clues himself except some darkly elegiac shots of a dead deer and a crow that crashes into her window in the middle of the night.
Kinnear who plays the roles of these strange men revealed that when he received the initial script, some of these roles were not completely fleshed out. It became his task to infuse each of these weirdos with life on screen, which he does memorably.
[Spoiler ahead] A twenty-minute long climax ensues with an uncomfortably prolonged childbirth scene with a man giving birth to another fully formed man, repeating in a loop until Harper’s face shows signs of unimpressed recognition as to why she’s subjected to these bizarre events, with her husband appearing in the end. [Spoiler ends]
Is it a take on unhealthy relationships that turn obsessively clingy? Or a feminist tale attesting to the resilience of women? However one looks at it, Men is the edgiest thing to flow out of Garland’s pen.
As Rory Kinnear said during the Q&A post-screening, Men reveals itself in different layers each time you view it. Only just needs the stomach for it even though the first time sufficiently primes you for subsequent viewings.
Rating: 3.5
Prathap Nair is an independent culture features writer based in Germany.
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