Alex Garland's latest film "Men," is one of those trippy, allegorical thrillers like Charlie Kaufman's "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" or David Lynch's "Mulholland Dr." Things start out as normal as can be, and by the end realism has gone bye-bye and fever dream surrealism has taken over. A viewer has to actively interpret what is being presented on the screen, because if you approach it in a straightforward manner, nothing makes sense. Some viewers love movies like this and others hate them. I am usually in the former category because I love watching talented directorsgo a little nuts.
With "Men," Garland is in the same groove as his recent "Annihilation," presenting some striking, often disturbing images of hallucinatory body horror. His heroine, Harper (Jessie Buckley), is recently widowed and having a holiday in a rented manor house in a remote village. Immediately, she's put on edge by the property's owner, Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear), and then there are several more unpleasant incidents involving a naked man who seems to follow her out of the woods, a judgmental local vicar, and a nasty young boy. All of them appear to have Rory Kinner's face. As Harper becomes more paranoid, it's clear that her state of mind is being affected by the recent death of her husband James (Paapa Essiedu), which may have been an accident, and may have been a suicide.
There's really not much to the story, just a slow buildup of tensions to a nightmarish finale. Every review I've read for "Men" points to toxic masculinity as a major theme of the film, though this strikes me as reductive. All the different male characters who harass and threaten Harper in various ways are part of the same problem, and all essentially facets of the same, oppressive force in her life. However, this force is comprised of the lingering psychic trauma from her husband's death, her fears about men, and her own guilt and grief for the part she might have played in her own misfortune. There's some supernatural spookiness involving the appearance of a figure who seems to be patterned off of the mythological Green Man, and a jarring home invasion as part of the climax, but this is not a horror film in the way something like Ari Aster's "Midsommar" is. Harper is being persecuted by phantoms I was never sure were real, and there's always a strong likelihood that everything we're watching is only taking place in her head.
These wilder events are where the film is worth watching, even if you have no interest in trying to puzzle out the symbolism or the themes. The visuals are truly gorgeous and weird, and executed with some real skill and auteurist vision. There's a great jump scare about half an hour into the film, when the stalker first shows up. It doesn't make any sense in the context of the story because Harper doesn't see him, but the way the scene plays out adds a great jolt of energy to the film, and signals that the crazy is ramping up. The suspense and action sequences are all orchestrated wonderfully, and the ending confrontation - involving a series of nude men - is truly one of the most awesomely deranged things I've seen in a film in a while. The fact that it's so beautifully done with seamless effects work really impressed me. It's one thing to come up with an idea like this, and another thing entirely to commit considerable resources to realizing it.
I'm not totally satisfied with "Men" as a whole, because its metaphors are too straightforward for my tastes. The film's parts, however, are very entertaining. Jessie Buckley has no trouble inhabiting this metaphysically dubious space and showing us how Harper unravels, while Rory Kinnear gets to be menacing in all sorts of different ways. I wish Garland engaged a little more with his ideas, and dug a bit deeper into Harper's psyche to maybe try and illuminate what the more primal roots of her fears are. Also, while toxic masculinity is a perfectly good subject, "Men" can't help feeling a little one-sided. Can you imagine Garland making a companion piece called "Women" with all the genders flipped?
But then again, as artsy allegorical thrillers go, this one is very good at being entertaining as well as being a hallucinatory mind trip. And these days, I don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
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