Reviewed by Colin Jacobson (September 28, 2022)
Alex Garland earned an Oscar nomination for his directorial debut, 2015’s Ex Machina. 2018’s Annihilation received a more mixed reaction but still seemed largely well-regarded.
Both of those movies took Garland into the sci-fi realm. For his third feature, 2022’s Men, Garland more firmly takes on horror – though with a trippy feel reflective of his first two movies.
After the sudden death of her husband James (Paapa Essiedu), Harper Marlowe (Jessie Buckley) retreats to a secluded property in the English countryside. There she hopes to reflect and recharge as she attempts to work past her recent trauma.
Tranquility remains out of her purview, however, as the remote town where she goes comes with a mix of strange inhabitants. These encounters go from weird to bad to worse as Harper struggles to deal with various threats.
Though I didn’t dislike Annihilation, I felt it reflected a step down after Machina. I admired Garland’s willing to take on something as ambitious as Annihilation, but the end result dabbled in so many domains that it failed to come together as a coherent product.
Garland leaned toward pretensions in those first two movies, but he reined in these tendencies to a reasonable degree. That doesn’t become the case with Men, though, as he lets his freak flag fly here.
Which might not turn into a bad thing if Men offered more substance than it does. Essentially a long commentary on “toxic masculinity”, the movie tends to undercut any progressive points it wants to make via its semi-myopic worldview.
Mainly this occurs because the film doesn’t allow Harper to become an especially proactive character. Granted, this exists as a horror trope, whereby characters need to be intelligent enough for us to respect them but still behave in stupid enough ways to find themselves stuck in situations that they should escape.
That becomes true for Harper. While the threats around her build, she continually ignores reasons to leave.
Perhaps this exists as part of Garland’s point. After all, plenty of smart women stay in bad relationships, and usually for less than logical reasons.
Nonetheless, this becomes a problem as part of this particular narrative. Harper’s unwillingness to really accept the threat around her just makes her seem like a dope.
The bigger issue here comes from Garland’s relentless implication that a) all men are the same and b) all men are bad. Perhaps I overstate that theme, but it does feel difficult to see many other interpretations.
In a very clever-clever move, Garland makes the “all men are the same” concept literal in ways I can’t discuss if I want to avoid spoilers. However, suffice it to say that this choice helps send Men down a completely absurd rabbit hole.
Indeed, the movie gets more and more ridiculous as it goes. The first act actually comes with some promise.
Our flashbacks to Harper’s abusive relationship with James offer powerful implications about how men manipulate women, and we also get subtle nods to the ways in which women self-diminish so they don’t “threaten” men.
For instance, when the house’s owner Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear) shows her the home’s piano room, she claims she doesn’t know how to play. However, a later scene reveals that she possesses very good musical abilities.
This feels like a smart nod to the way women act around men. They can often subsume themselves to avoid “offending the male ego”, such as when girls hide their classroom smarts because they think intelligence turns off boys.
All of this seems fairly compelling through the movie’s first act, and Buckley’s solid performance helps. She gives Harper an appropriate sense of pain and confusion as she works through her trauma.
Unfortunately, the farther into Men we go, the more it becomes about its “toxic masculinity” themes and less about Harper’s actual journey. Garland gets so hung up on its “all men suck” concept that he forgets to tell a coherent narrative.
Actually, I could forgive the story’s loss of obvious purpose as it goes if it didn’t just become so darned ridiculous. Garland tosses out so many metaphors that the entire enterprise gets bogged down in them.
Maybe Garland feels that because his first two films ranged into the abstract realms, he needs to pursue this path with each project. However, I think a less abstract version of Men would fare better simply because all the crazy weirdness simply undercuts the movie’s themes.
Garland is clearly a bright guy and a talented filmmaker. However, he can’t restrain his pretensions, and that makes Men a silly enterprise in the end.
