Alex Garland (2022)
Ben Salisbury’s and Geoff Barrow’s relentlessly eerie score for Men is an apt accompaniment to Alex Garland’s latest, an increasingly monotonous horror story. Garland’s choice of music to play over the opening and closing titles is fitting, too – ‘Love Song’, composed and sung by the late Lesley Duncan. The film is a denunciation of its title characters generally. Via Duncan and in the intervening narrative, writer-director Garland co-opts a woman’s voice and point of view, in what seems to be an attempt to convince audiences of his feminist credentials[1].
Recently widowed Harper (Jessie Buckley) drives to the English village of Cotson where she has rented a large country house. She’s looking forward to her getaway as a chance to begin to recover from the trauma of her husband’s sudden death: James (Paapa Essiedu), as the film soon reveals, fell from the balcony of the young couple’s apartment in a London block of flats. Watching Harper’s arrival at her holiday destination, from an upstairs window of the house, is its owner Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear, wearing a wig and false teeth). Their opening conversation instantly establishes Geoffrey as exceedingly hearty, awkward and creepy: Cotson is evidently next door to Royston Vasey. In the house’s garden there’s an apple tree and Harper helps herself to one of the fruit. I was infuriated by her assumption that this was OK, and almost relieved when Geoffrey told her off for scrumping, before assuring her he’s only joking. He isn’t, of course: he also refers to ‘forbidden fruit’, although this particular Eve seems not tempted but impelled by entitlement to eat thereof.
Later that afternoon, Harper goes for a walk through the fields and woodland near the house. She revels in the fresh air and wide-open spaces but not for long. She follows a disused railway line into a tunnel at the end of which she sees a figure that begins chasing her. She gets away from it but, after leaving the tunnel and as she takes a photo on her phone, inadvertently snaps a male figure standing outside an abandoned building. The man isn’t Geoffrey but he is Rory Kinnear (now wearing nothing at all). The next morning, we see Harper preparing breakfast, so that Alex Garland can display the impressive supply of cutlery in the country house kitchen. Harper uses a knife to slice a grapefruit in half: a close-up on the blade is a sure sign it will penetrate human flesh before the film is out. She video-calls her friend Riley (Gayle Rankin) and conducts her on a tour of the house. While she’s doing so, Harper sees in the garden the naked man she saw the previous day. She phones 999 and two uniformed police arrive – one male (Kinnear, of course), one female – to arrest the prowler. The WPC (Sarah Twomey) talks kindly and sensitively with Harper, a conversation that stands out in the 100 minutes of Men because it’s reasonably natural and unshadowed by menace or aggression.
You don’t expect rigorous realism in this kind of film; you can still expect credible motivation. If she’s emotionally fragile and desperate for peace and quiet, why does Harper stay in Cotson after such an unnerving start? She must in order for the story to keep going but Garland supplies no compelling reason for her staying put – she isn’t, for example, fascinated by her surroundings or determined to subdue her frailties. In the afternoon, she visits a local church, where she encounters a verbally abusive schoolboy (Kinnear’s face is CGI-grafted onto a child’s body) and a superficially sympathetic vicar (whose wig is worse than Geoffrey’s). He soon puts his hand on her knee, tells Harper she is ‘an expert in carnality – this is your power’, and insinuates that she may have caused her husband’s death. She reasonably swears at the reverend and stomps off. By the time she drops into a pub that evening, we know she’s asking for trouble. The clientele consists of Geoffrey, the male PC and three new Kinnears – the pub owner and two other baleful-looking customers. Harper is alarmed to learn from the police officer that the man arrested earlier in the day has now been released. As she makes her way back to the house, Garland’s horror show goes into overdrive, and stays there until the closing scene.
Men might have gripped as a bewildering nightmare if Garland hadn’t given so much screen time to Harper’s backstory. In the film’s prologue, she comes forward to the window of the London apartment to face the camera; we notice, just before James plummets, that Harper’s face is smeared with blood. Further flashbacks bluntly explain that her husband was abusive and controlling and, for good measure, a self-pitying wimp. When Harper decided to divorce him James threatened to kill himself and he proves as good as his word. He’s such an explicit presence in the narrative there’s no mystery about the source of his widow’s fearful, guilt-ridden state of mind or why all the men in Cotson are the same man: the several incarnations of Rory Kinnear are a colour-blind proxy for Paapa Essiedu’s James. Even this underlining isn’t enough for Garland. In his death fall, James breaks his ankle and impales his arm on a railing. Back from the pub, Harper confronts serial intruders – one Kinnear morphs into another – and grabs a kitchen knife. When the naked man sticks his arm through the letterbox she stabs him. He pulls his arm free but it’s split in two, just like James’s (and that grapefruit). The nasty schoolboy and the handsy vicar take their turn to threaten Harper, and suffer the same injury.
That pair aren’t the only presences in the church, whose sculptures include a Green Man and a sheela-na-gig – the stylised figure of a naked woman with a hugely pronounced vulva. These images are enough for Men to have been labelled a folk horror film although they seem more designed to lay the ground for the spectacular, special-effects finale. The face and body of the naturist Kinnear start to sprout stems and leaves, Green Man-style (and his ankle is badly broken, James-style). He then turns pregnant and gives birth to the schoolboy, who gives birth to the vicar, who gives birth to Geoffrey. Garland doesn’t just mount a procession of toxic masculinity but makes that phrase’s adjective redundant: the poison, according to his film, is pandemic. Yet Men also, ironically and unintentionally, demonstrates a fair degree of misogyny. The climactic relay of births may involve only the unfair sex but the obs-and-gynae implications of swollen bellies, vaginal deliveries and afterbirth on the floor of the holiday home are unfortunately confusing: it’s as if men are so awful they’ll go so far as to imitate women. The film’s least surprising moment arrives when Geoffrey gives birth to Harper’s late husband: it’s been clear for over an hour that her rural idyll turned rural ordeal is James-induced. This capper, if it says anything at all, shows Harper as paranoid – suggests that everything that’s happened in Cotson was a garish exaggeration of her mistreatment by James, maybe even all-a-bad-dream.
Although I didn’t find Alex Garland’s debut feature Ex Machina (2015) wholly successful, it certainly made me want to see what he did next. I chickened out of his second film, Annihilation (2018) – the combination of sci-fi and horror and Natalie Portman in the lead was too much – but I was hopeful about Men, given the main names in the cast. Jessie Buckley goes through the motions very ably but Garland seems to have encouraged her to react to everything, the verdant landscape as much as the horrors, so that she sometimes looks to be over-reacting. She has none of the freedom she showed in her scenes with the children in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter last year or, perhaps more to the point, in Michael Pearce’s psychological thriller Beast (2017). When he first appears as Geoffrey, Rory Kinnear, although he might be guest-starring in Inside No 9, raises hopes we’ll be in for superior rep acting entertainment on the lines of Alec Guinness’s gallery of caricatures in Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). It isn’t Kinnear’s fault that the repeatedly sinister personnel he’s saddled with don’t give him the chance to deliver that.
A minor, unexplained mystery of Men: why does Harper rent such an enormous place in which to stay alone? After a couple of quick tours of the premises – Geoffrey’s, when Harper first arrives, and the interrupted one on FaceTime – Garland doesn’t make much use of the country house’s many rooms: a cottage would have done just as well. The morning after the mayhem, Riley (who turns out to be pregnant), arrives at the house. She’s dismayed by a trail of blood at the entrance but then sees Harper sitting in the grounds outside. Their exchange of sisterhood smiles is meant to signify a happy ending of sorts but I felt Harper was in need of company more relaxing than Gayle Rankin’s overdone kick-ass Riley. I’d rather have seen the return of the nice policewoman to assure the heroine she’s not the only girl in the village.
8 June 2022
[1] Afternote: According to the Wikipedia page on Lesley Duncan, both her and Elton John’s versions of ‘Love Song’ are featured in Men – so I may be doing Garland, on this point anyway, a partial injustice.
