Somewhere in the remote English countryside, a young middle-class professional from London named Harper Marlowe (Jessie Buckley) rents a very picturesque old property, seeking a soul-cleansing respite from a recent trauma. Received by the owner of the estate, a red-nosed and awkward character named Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear), she is forced to inform him that she is no longer "Mrs." Marlowe, stirring up horrifying memories of her last row with her emotionally unstable ex-husband James (played in flashback by Paapa Essiedu). After some time of contending with James's inability to manage his mental illness, Harper had finally had enough and announced her decision to divorce him. In response, James threatened to kill himself, and even punched Harper, leading her to furiously kick him out of their apartment. In a desperate attempt to get back in, James forced his way into the home of an upstairs neighbor, tried climbing down from the balcony, and then fell to his death, leaving Harper scarred with the image of his face looking back at her through the windows as she witnessed him fall.
At any rate, she's simply "Ms. Marlowe" until she can restore her maiden name. And with the encouragement of her best friend Riley (Gayle Rankin), Harper is taking advantage of her new independence with a much-needed therapeutic holiday.
Of course, big old houses in remote towns tend to always have something queer or "off" about them, unless you're the protagonist of a liberating romantic comedy. Unfortunately for Harper, this is a horror film, and it shan't be long before the cellular service all the way out there in the country starts giving out at the worst possible time, before the enchantment of local color is revealed for something more ominous and predatory, or before we as spectators become increasingly impatient with another horror heroine who just won't take a hint and get out of the old dark house.
Distributed by A24, Men is the latest film by Alex Garland, a successful novelist, screenwriter, and producer whose film career took a decisive turn with the critical success of his directorial debut, Ex Machina, in 2014. Also distributed by A24, Ex Machina was a sort of sci-fi chamber drama dealing with artificial intelligence and starring Alicia Vikander as a humanoid robot who is kept the prisoner of her tech CEO creator (played by Oscar Isaac), and who becomes the object of obsession for the lowly programmer (Domhnall Gleeson) hired to gauge her sentience. Made for just $15 million and grossing over twice its budget, largely on word-of-mouth and effusive general praise, Ex Machina proved a turning point for both Garland and A24, the film and its director joining a rapidly growing roster of genre movies and their auteurs whose more cerebral and stylized approach certified the distributor as the flagship courier for slick independent cinema that could realistically compete with major studio fare.
Four years later, Garland would follow up Ex Machina with Annihilation, an adaptation of the novel by Jeff VanderMeer and starring Natalie Portman as a U.S. Army veteran who leads an all-woman reconnaissance mission into a quarantined zone where an alien force seems to mutate everything within its expanding field of influence. An adventurous departure from the claustrophobia of Ex Machina, Annihilation further highlighted Garland's clear sources of inspiration in films like Stanley Kubrick's 2001 or Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker and Solaris, as well as the novels from which they were adapted. But unmistakeable in its conceit and execution was also the poppier sentiment of James Cameron's Aliens or The Abyss. In addition to an observational fascination with speculative mutant nature - a visceral attachment to playing with biology and color through state-of-the-art visual effects - Garland also inherited from James Cameron a certain kind of political sentimentality. Building a sci-fi adventure around an almost exclusively female cast may not have been intended as a feminist provocation, but it inevitably becomes one in the context of a genre where the feminine gender, just as much as non-white race, tends to be staffed more than to lead, to be tokenized as much as anything else. And in that provocation, Annihilation also reflected Garland's continued interest in using science-fiction as an allegorical framework to explore and criticize patriarchy and hegemonic constructions of gender. There is a fine line in the film between the subjective of the characters and the symbolic order of the world around them, a line made all the thinner by Garland's suggestion that the latter is, in fact, intruding upon the other, warping it out of any ability to distinguish hallucination from reality.
Unfortunately, the technical ambitiousness of the film (produced for a substantially higher budget than Ex Machina and distributed by a major studio) also translated to a flabbiness in Garland's vision. Frequently beautiful and resilient, Annihilation was also incredibly tedious, its moments of formal exuberance awkwardly complimenting its moments of non-picturesque naturalism, the resulting visual spectacle falling as flat as its otherwise textbook drama. Furthermore, Annihilation proved a significant financial disappointment, the victim of a creative dispute between its producers, mishandling by its distributor, and simply a lack of the same kind of word-of-mouth momentum that had supported Ex Machina.
Now, Garland returns again to A24, with a production that cost about a fifth of what Ex Machina did. But if his return to a small budget and a much more contained drama suggests that Garland is reigning in his indulgences, make no mistake, Men represents a dramatic heightening of the same ambitions that colored Annihilation. Working again with cinematographer Rob Hardy, Garland completely blows his previous major studio work out of the water with one of the most visually and sensually beguiling horror movies in quite some time. With Buckley at the central foreground of the film's mounting horror spectacle, it additionally proves to be his most accessible film yet in terms of its grounded, psychologically relatable drama. And at the end of it all, it still bares out to be Garland's most frustrating accomplishment as a clearly talented and nuanced artist.
The big gimmick of Men is that Rory Kinnear isn't only playing the disarmingly pathetic landlord Geoffrey. He assumes the identities of every male character in the small town setting of the film, including a policeman, a vicar, a preteen boy, and, most terrifying of all, a bald, nude, and silent transient who Harper accidentally disturbs from his sleep while going for a hike one evening, and who follows her back to her rental and attempts to break in. At times, Kinnear is able to embody these characters and explore their various personalities through conventional means, i.e. costume and prosthetic make-up. At other times, digital techniques of projection mapping and animation are used, such as when an unnaturally de-aged version of Kinnear's face is transplanted onto the performance of child actor Zak Rothera-Oxley. This latter instance, in which the filmmakers allow the unnaturalness of the boy's appearance to be a part of the disquieting aesthetic of a scene, typifies the surreality that Garland produces much more successfully here than in Annihilation.
The gimmick overall also underscores the filmmakers' feminist provocation, the spectacle progressively punctured by this sense of a tension between how the characters experience the world of the film in apparently naturalistic terms, and our own awareness of the falseness of this reality. Every man that Harper encounters after the death of her ex-husband looks alike, but she does not seem to notice this at all, or to treat it as significant. She doesn't even mention it to Riley, who, communicating via video chat, is all the way back in London, back in a 'real world' that Garland only gestures to as existing somehow outside the zones of either this northern town or Harper's own flashbacks. We never so much reach this 'real world' as we do glimpse it peripherally, as an interference with our sense of the consistency in the film's surreality, just as its surreal elements conflict with its moments of naturalism.
All the men look alike and, in addition, all the men come to embody a central malevolent entity. Geoffrey is friendly enough, but never really seems to listen. The cop who arrests the transient lets him go, not taking Harper's concerns seriously. The boy hurls vicious insults at her, and when she confides in the priest, he minimizes James's abuse of her and insinuates her guilt in her ex-husband's demise. And if a very pagan-looking and sexually-explicit altar that Harper discovers in the local chapel is any indication, the uncanny unison of these various characters may relate to some dark supernatural force not unlike the one in Annihilation, an expanding field of corruption or mutating influence. Garland represents this by blending visual conventions of folk and cosmic horror, suggesting that the animating terror of the film is somewhere between occult magic and alien assimilation, between Algernon Blackwood's "Ancient Sorceries" and John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Who Goes There? As the story builds towards its endurance-testing climax, Garland successively abandons any illusion that these faces of Kinnear are anything short of a single being, all working towards the same preternatural ends, which are to keep Harper in the rental, to keep her afraid. Visually and metaphysically all part of the same horror, his characters stand in for the whole spectrum of toxic male personages as they become enmeshed with Harper's own traumatic experience.
It should be said, however, that this gimmick would not work nearly as well as it does (to the extent that it does, rather) without Garland's layering of his surreality through much more subtle means. His and Hardy's cinematography in particular is outstanding. Their use of shallow depth of field, especially when giving in to the simple, otherworldly fascination of visually surveying natural environments, creates canvases where much remains totally out of focus, achieving a disquieting but soft refractory effect with the light and color of the scene. By changing the focus in mid shot, they also create the feeling of a sweeping, ghostly barrier, a moving threshold between the natural and supernatural that bedevils the heroine's unhappy adventure. When Garland and Hardy do employ deep focus, on the other hand, they may also use long lenses that compress our sense of depth to a degree that it becomes like an optical illusion, the distance appearing so close yet so small, such as when Harper first arrives and stands looking through the tunnel from which she awakens Kinnear's transient. One immediately gets the impression of Alice standing at the threshold of a door that only leads to a yet smaller door.
None of the characters in the film ever dwell upon whether or not the assimilation of this town - not of its men alone, but also of its very earth and sky - is mainly spiritual, biological, psychological, or allegorical in nature. Men remains, for the most part, a fascinating ordeal that can safely dispense with these pedantic distinctions. And undergirding the more obtrusive feminist provocation of Kinnear's casting is an understated exploration of the queer ways in which social constructions of femininity and masculinity are bound together in a perverse ouroboros, enfolding upon one another as Harper's physical battle against her hive-minded male assailants parallels what is, by the anticlimactic finish, suggested to be just as much a story about her own internal process, of the character holistically working through her trauma in the warped, allegorical form of a horror movie. Men evokes horror at the patriarchal monster that seeks to possess and keep her, but in a move that will no doubt gaul as many viewers as it wins over, the film also treats this monster as a grotesque puppet of ridicule, embodying all of the pathetic, weak, dependent, and hysterical traits traditionally associated with the feminine, but now assumed by a masculine threat.
In as much as there is not a sure distinction between the natural and the surreal, there is also not much distinction between the male characters that Kinnear embodies as Harper's ultimate nightmare, and Harper herself as their imaginative psychical center. This horror is, in part, her own internalized thoughts and aspects of her personality embodied before her. The greatest visual feat of the production is not any of its effects, but rather the subtle similarity it captures between Buckley and Kinnear's faces, suggesting a strange kinship. Buckley's own androgynous haircut and costuming for the film is complimented by things such as the vicar's briefly seen, long, polished, effeminate nails; or the preteen boy's wearing of a plastic mask depicting the face of a rosy-cheeked, blonde-haired girl. This, in turn, refers back to that bizarre altar, out of which is carved a depiction of the Green Man (a legendary male figure symbolizing seasonal renewal) on one side, and on its Janus face an Earth goddess laying down and exposing her genitals, either preparing for insemination or birth. The occult interdependency between these figures informs upon Garland's progressive revelation of this toxic masculine monster, a creature that seeks to consume the feminine Other that it both desires and, in a deeply repressed way, also envies. In the collision between our sense of the film's 'false reality' and the obscurity of the characters' ability to perceive such falsity, the film does prove latently surreal in the sense that it feels like it reveals just as much as it provokes, that it's cerebral qualities get downright sinewy.
This also leads to an ironic sense of triumph on Harper's part, or at least a leading ambiguity, that punctuates the film's abrupt conclusion, which is quite at odds with the more concrete sense of dread built up by Hardy's incredibly lush and painterly photography, as well as in the film's fantastic score, equal parts gothic and synthetic, by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury (fellow Ex Machina and Annihilation veterans.) I feel it will be as refreshing to some as it is presumptuous and annoying to others, or that it's destined to be one of those movies that can only achieve an unhappy combo of both for just about everyone. In the theater in which I viewed it, at least, by the end credits, it felt like all the air had been sucked out of the room, and that the tremors of those who were downright mad weren't slow to rise above the end credits music. I must say, though, that I do recall the experience of the film fondly, when I think about its parts, if not necessarily the sum of its parts.
Men is, if anything, even at its incredibly modest budget, a film that does too much, a classic example of a filmmaker too often confusing the surreal with a gratuity of what has come to be called 'dream logic.' As was the case with Iuli Gerbase's The Pink Cloud, the abstract presentation of the film's narrative obscures the fact that more or less everything that happens in Men can be understood in terms of the film simply being a idiosyncratic presentation of a normal sci-fi monster movie. By the same token, this story that is quite simple, rather than archetypal, comes off as less than sufficiently fleshed out, or even, at times, lazily unaccounted for. The tension between our awareness of the false reality of Kinnear's repeating face, and the way Harper takes no note of it, comes off successfully surreal at times, but at others as just stupid. Even at its most viscerally successful, the film is undermined by a latent sense of its own ironic banality, of the rudimentary monster movie plot that Garland did not adequately structure before refining it in Picasso-like terms. There are too many times when the film is ostensibly teasing our imaginations to fill in the gaps, to come to our own nervous conclusions through the general fascination with fear of the unknown, only to, in fact, show too much, leaving only the most quizzical and pretentious questions to mystery, especially during the film's very graphic climax.
Now that I think about it, I can't help but recall Sean Ellis's The Cursed, a straighter folk horror movie that the A24 crowd no doubt skipped over, but which beat Garland to the punch not only with its aesthetic fusion of supernatural and sci-fi motifs in its own monster, but also with the very specific depiction of a repulsive creature that is effectively doomed to constantly give birth to itself. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Ellis presents the superior vision. Indeed, I'd say that Men and The Cursed are fitting companion pieces, both viscerally fascinating and conceptually undercooked horror films that trade virtues and vices with one another. Which is to say, Ellis's film may happily scratch any itch left by the inadequacies of Garland's own movie, and probably for a price less severe when one is left flipping the coin, trying to figure out if the extent of their interest in one film or the other works out to them actually feeling sufficiently stimulated by that interest.
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