Directed By Alex Garland

Starring – Jessie Buckley, Rory Kinnear, Paapa Essiedu

The Plot – In the aftermath of a personal tragedy, Harper (Buckley) retreats alone to the beautiful English countryside, hoping to have found a place to heal. But someone or something from the surrounding woods appears to be stalking her, and what begins as simmering dread becomes a fully formed nightmare, inhabited by her darkest memories and subliminal fears.

Rated R for disturbing and violent content, graphic nudity, grisly images and adult language.

Men | Official Trailer HD | A24 – YouTube

POSITIVES

Garland continues his run as a fearless, gut-wrenching aficionado of cinema, this time peeling back the layers of evocative imagery to exploit a gripping social commentary on the materialism of toxic masculinity, and how it’s used to justify the way men view woman as just one thing. This makes “Men” an endearing watch certainly on entertaining value alone, but also a thought-provokingly insightful one based on the stitching of the narrative and how it materializes to physical forms in leading to one of the most unforgettable endings that you are sure to see this year. Garland’s masterful work lends itself to so many artistic instances that help to flesh out a constantly unnerving engagement, especially in the defining characteristics of the production’s technical elements, which gives it that unique distinguishing that values psychological heft just as much as physical conflict. The sound design here is impeccable, balanced superbly in volume elevations and bizarre mixing that not only vividly convey the isolation factor of the established setting, but also helps in maximizing the vulnerability of our protagonist, whose burdening of even therapeutic quiet has her constantly seeking out a noise or self-manufactured influence to break the spell of circumstantial grief. This leads to one of the more creative compositions of a musical score, using echoing of Buckley’s vocal capabilities while in a hollow tunnel to elicit rhythmic hymns that play all the more spectacularly towards the film’s religious subtext, all the while crafting a suffocating unnerve in atmospheric dread that anxiously anticipates before paying off with a series of well-timed jump scares to remind you of its horror-first antithesis. Adding to this concept is also the abundance in brutality, which prove that Garland once again is not afraid to get his hands dirty for the sake of tantalizing an audience. One such instance involving a hand had me squirming in my seat, and when combined with the unflinching depiction within the movie’s transfixing shot compositions, gives emphasis to the hard-R rating that this film is constantly exuding in more than a few shocking instances within its material. Speaking of the film’s imagery, whether startling us with supernatural snapshots, or sedating us with spell-binding scenery, the work here from longtime Garland cohort, Rob Hardy, transfixes with a substantial style of colorful impulses that feed all the more vividly to the atmospheric absorbency of the sequences. This is especially the case during interior scenes taking shape in front of an all red backdrop of wall decor that reflect seamlessly in the faces of its characters in fear and anguish, as well as exterior scenes luminating a three-dimensional canvas of spring amidst the engulfing forests and blossoming apple trees that decorate its endless fields of imagination. Finally, while the technical elements articulate a breathtaking engagement inside of this trepidation nightmare, it’s the work from Buckley and Kinnear that elevate this to must-see cinema in the form of two sides of the moral coin with no shortage of ethos or nuance to their respective turns. For Kinnear, that lends itself to as many as six different characters that he plays for the occasion, with each of them not only harvesting a unique angle of masculinity to properly define in the toxicity, but also respective turns that each supplant a diversity in personality and portrayal that prove the actor’s merit with committing himself to a character. However, even six Kinnear’s can’t equal one Buckley, and even in a career already filled with memorable turns, Jessie’s work here might just be the best of her youthful career. For such an occasion, her character’s unresolved grief affords her an unlimited disposal of untimely rage and tender frailty that often take her sanity hostage, all the while conjuring up a dynamic with the many faces of Kinnear that each produce something equally compelling in the allure of the consequential stirring that are blending towards an inevitably erupting pot towards the movie’s climax.

NEGATIVES

Though this is another example of a creative success overall for Garland, who continues to produce refreshing installments to both the science-fiction and horror genres, “Men” isn’t without a barrage of problems that diminish the averages of its returns, and unfortunately leaves this as his weakest film to date despite the aforementioned successes. First and foremost, if you’re not a student of film analysis, expect to be lost on this one, especially in the aspect of the film’s final fifteen minutes, which stacks mystery upon mystery in offering a confound resolution that is anticlimactic at least, and underwhelming at most. I totally felt that I interpreted everything that Garland was going for during the experience, but that clarity didn’t help diffuse the overwhelming disappointment stitched to a climax that was up until then a riveting fight for survival and left as nothing more than shock value the longer that I’ve had time to sit and properly diagnose everything that persisted. This leads me to the storytelling itself, which between donating time to two respective timelines, feels consistently jarring in the exposition we as an audience are meant to receive, especially since one was so obviously more endearing and rewarding to my experience, and that’s the stuff happening in the present during Harper’s therapeutic getaway. This is not to say that the stuff happening in the past lacked intrigue or importance, just that we spent too much time fleshing it out in order to keep audiences at eye level to what otherwise seems like a very symbolic and metaphorical film. Each time the story flashed back, which I felt was far too often, it drained the momentum of anything attained during the unraveling narrative, and made the pacing during the first act such a chore to get through when the film should be hooking you the easiest. Last but not least, I felt like there were a few instances where the terror gave way to unintentional humor, and not in ways that offer complimentary levity for the occasion. This is in some instances during the film with certain character lines, but more especially towards a computer-generated character, who is distracting to say the least. If they kept this character in nighttime scenes, I feel like it would easier hide the flaws within the constructs of the design, as any scene in daylight with him brought back flashbacks to last year’s “Lamb”, but for all of the wrong reasons, and elicited more than a few laughs from my audience that took away directly from the riveting direction and suffocating dread that Garland marvelously builds in environmental impulses of the most palpable variety.

OVERALL

“Men” isn’t quite the introspective marvel that Garland’s previous two films exceeded at, but it is a revealing folk-horror movie about gender trauma that is elevated by the work of two masterful performances conveying 95% of the movie’s expanded ensemble. Though the thematic threads don’t stitch together as seamlessly satisfactory during a climax that completely obliterates nuance, it is another enigmatic and frightening psychological stinger that A24 has built a house from, and like those called upon in its one word title, crafts a confusingly volatile experience that you simply can’t escape from.

My Grade: 7/10 or B-