Men – aren’t we just, the worst?! This review is coming atcha from a straight white male so prepare to click off already if that doesn’t suit you. In my defence, I adored Mother! in the truest sense of the word; Jennifer Lawrence assuming the embodiment of Mother Nature, and contending with the pesky whims of Javier Bardem’s God. I’ve been really looking forward to seeing Men, although part of me is scared that the movie’s concepts may feel tiredly whiny or hostile. Director Alex Garland is certainly a deeply thoughtful thematic director though, and although I like Ex Machina more than Annihilation, both have their fervent admirers, and I do appreciate the minutia required in creating those worlds. Go on Men, shock me to my core!
Harper Marlowe (Jessie Buckley) needs a holiday in the countryside, to relieve herself of an awful debacle concerning her late husband. She rents a cottage off Jeffery (Rory Kinnear), who tells her that this peaceful town will offer secluded nature walks and a pub that’s only a stone’s throw away. Pretty soon, strange things begin to happen, evoking the supernatural, yet Harper’s main concern is that the other townsfolk she meets are none too nice; it’s down the rabbits hole she goes.
Credit where credit is due, I think Men has a wonderful trailer, although I wonder how amazing it would’ve been to discover that all the townsmen have the same face, in the same wild incremental way the movie plays out – that’s a pretty unique design, isn’t it? I can’t think of another movie that’s done it. It does posit for the viewer that old adage that ‘all men are the same’, which I obviously don’t agree with, but I think the argument the movie makes is that all of men’s problems are one and the same big problem for a woman, and that’s an idea I can get behind. I worried how much of Men would be a derivative of what has come before, and on the nose – the scene where Jeffery tells Harper off for picking an apple, and Harper says, ‘Oh God, I’m sorry’ couldn’t be more Genesis, and I’m not talking about Phil Collins. The Bible gets a bashing, more for the results of its entitled lectures, and I admire the focus on the church basin, that has a tyrannical God depicted as a man on one side, and an open fanny on the other side, nothing but a crude tool, a vessel for life. According to scripture after all, Man is created in God’s image, and Eve was just an afterthought, responsible for original sin. Harper walks around the countryside like it’s the Garden of Eden, with beautiful and lingering shots of the glistening green, but a stalker quickly has her fearful of sharing the same space inherited by humankind but unevenly paraded by men.
The movie kept me on the edge of my seat, and there are great moments that stand out for their execution, like the quiet walk in the woods. The first fight between Harper and ex-husband James (Paapa Essiedu) is pulsating – it doesn’t last quite as long as those in Marriage Story, but it sucks the air out of the room just the same. The sensor light outages that allow the men to disappear and reappear outside is also appropriately tense. Then there’s the visceral stuff, the queasiness I felt right after Harper stabs the naked man in the arm 😬 Save that gore for the Saw traps! Yet from that, it is somewhat revealed what is going on and that all these men are the same, literally, as from this point forward all the men now have the same arm slit. It’s some sort’ve male succubus I guess, which are most commonly females in storytelling, like ‘the lady in the water’, or the ‘sirens of the sea’.
I was prepared to knock off half a star for Men, as just as Annihilation, this ending gets very metamorphic and kooky. But I’m glad it did in a way, as it allowed me to reflect on childbirth, and how all people come into this world through a woman, often associated with a woman’s scream through the agony of the process – a torment, that continues thereafter for a woman if a lack of appreciation or crummy male mentality is present. But the movie seemed to be meandering towards an ending, reducing my confidence that a landing would stick – then James reappears, and although the movie may be mansplaning itself a little bit, it ends with the only explanation for the madness that Men presents, and that’s a combined insecurity or quest for love – it’s a warped intention of puerile behaviour, but one I may not necessarily disagree with.
Jessie Buckley is the new it-girl in Hollywood, there’s no doubting that. The woman is on a heater, with four brilliant projects in a row for mine, and I adore her vulnerability. I think this might be the first time I’ve heard her use her natural Irish accent, and first I wondered if it was an addition to her character, as a proximate stab at the church, being Catholic, or Irish Catholic, perhaps the poster of ironclad Catholic purity. It could be both – it could be a deliberation of the character, AND Buckley’s natural flow… Rory Kinnear clearly has to act as multiple characters and I found his performance made me giddy, as it works in a cliched parodied way, compared to something like Lupita Nyong’o in Us, that felt like two very serious characters. Yet Kinnear’s contribution to the movie is key, and we do feel somewhat comforted by Jeffery, and menaced by the naked man, so there’s a captured range to it.
Here I was worried that Men would be a derivative of other similarly themed feminist narratives, but I had a thrilling experience with Men, as it etches out its own exploration of the results of archaic ideas that misconstrue, and intertwine, women and ownership. Men also doesn’t skip on how masculine doubts attack men on men too, which I think is grand, with Jeffery stating that at the age of seven (!) his father belittled his manhood by telling him he would be unfit to be a soldier. Jeffery is also a victim of inherited duty – struggling to bring the bags in, and undermining Harper’s ability to look after herself by insisting he buy her a drink guised as good etiquette. Thinking over the movie for a day or two as I write this, the plot and overall product of Men doesn’t trump other movies I was considering around a similar rating (Spencer and Last Night in Soho for the record, for sharper messaging or dazzling execution, respectively). But even still, I have to make a personal apology. For a while now, I’ve been considering that there’s three rising specialists in the field of elevated horror – Jordan Peele, Robert Eggars, and Ari Aster – but there’s four. Because although I didn’t gel with Annihilation, Alex Garland has been keeping our brains ticking since Ex Machina. Men delivers a measured, sometimes mesmerising piece on women’s relations to men, and the intangible haunting that comes with it.
4.0
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