It is almost impossible to watch Alex Garland’s newest film, Men, without thinking of another A24 project: Midsommar. Both films, firmly parked in between folk horror and “elevated horror,” are centered on young women who retreat to the countryside following a traumatic family loss. Both films dabble in gender inequality and equity. Both trade in jump scares for a more disquieting atmospheric sense of horror. And yet, as is always the case, not all films are created - nor received - equally. 

Alex Garland, the filmmaker behind Annihilation and Ex Machina, has never shied away from his own auteurism. Even with the big budget of Annihilation, Garland was able to convincingly stay in his lane - a pseudo-sci-fi styling of life’s unanswerable questions. Men is no different. 

The film begins with Harper (played by the unmatchable Jessie Buckley) escaping to a cottage in the country following the suicide of her husband. She is met by property owner Geoffrey (the multifaceted Rory Kinnear), who shows her around the grounds she will be staying alone at for the next two weeks. As may be expected from a movie entitled Men, their initial encounter is littered with sexist microaggressions. The “men don’t know how to talk to women” trope is served to us as thoughtlessly as dinner rolls at a two-star restaurant; unnecessary and entirely expected.

Quickly though, Garland pivots to his (no pun intended, I promise) bread and butter. Harper wanders through the grounds of her temporary home and off into the woods. There she finds a tunnel: a long, dark echo chamber of her vocal calls. We stay with Harper in this tunnel long enough to feel settled in our uncomfortability. As the water drips from the black ceiling and her song echoes in our ears, a figure appears in the light at the other end and hurries towards her. Could it be a homeless person? Another hiker? Something supernatural? With Alex Garland, anything is on the proverbial table.

This sequence - singled out both here and in the film’s trailer - may be the apex of Garland’s directorial career to date. He is able to take a naturally eerie situation and make it genuinely terrifying. It sticks with you, ringing in your ears, resonating in your chest, long after Harper has fled back to her cottage. The tunnel gives a heartbeat to the film’s terror - a tangible, if unknowable, threat.

What follows that sequence is what follows most peaks - a steep dropoff. 

The B-side to Men takes its greatest qualities - its uneasiness, its Biblical metaphor, the brilliant performances of Buckley and Kinnear - and brings them to the edge of incomprehensibility. The A-side’s imagery, which vacillates between sharp and shallow (Kinnear reprimanding Buckley for “eating an apple from the garden,” for example, couldn’t make me roll my eyes harder) devolves into aimless flashes of “symbolism.” Men is made with an open interpretation of its images, Garland has admitted, which inadvertently leads to a lack of any interpretation. It is imagery for the sake of imagery.

Pair the loss of symbolism with some terrible CGI, a choppy backstory, and a plot that routinely rebirths itself (both figuratively throughout the film and literally through a grotesque climactic sequence), and you have what amounts to the first bonafide disappointment in Alex Garland’s filmography.

Men meets the mark of Garland’s auteurism, for sure. Its cinematography, sound design, and acting are top notch, as is always the case with his films. It centers itself, yet again and most painfully this time, around women’s grief. But the lack of interpretation around its symbols (and probably a lack of understanding towards the subject matter of what it is to actually be a woman in this world, too) corrodes the film, dragging it from a naturalistic plane of terror to the depths of body horror hell. 

To startle, to unsettle, to strip us of our emotions is not enough. You must build off of what you have established. And while Alex Garland is able to shake us here, he isn’t able to do anything more than that. What Men offers, ultimately and fittingly, is an unintelligible bark and a pretty painless bite.

Acting/Casting - 2 | Visual Effects and Editing - 1 | Story and Message - 0 | Entertainment Value - 1 | Music Score and Soundtrack - 1 | Reviewer’s Preference - 1 | What does this mean?