In England no one can hear you screaming.
That seems to be the premise of Alex Garland’s Men, whose grieving protagonist (Jessie Buckley) plays feral, earth-shattering bellows in all sorts of places: the bathtub, a church, the claustrophobic hallways of a mansion. Each time, her roars go unheard by those around her, even if they risk shattering an errant wine glass at the cinema.
Buckley is Harper Marlowe, a recent widow whose husband James (Paapa Essiedu), in a fit of rage, tripped — or jumped — off a high balcony, a tragedy rendered in syrupy slow motion in the opening shot of Men. Harper can only watch in horror as James falls past her, shrouded in an impressionistic sunset glow – a sight that continues to haunt us time and time again.
In the aftermath, Harper retreats to an off-grid estate for a weekend, ostensibly hoping to shed her grief with an ointment as old as time: fresh air and nature, hours away from any sign of life—at least she thinks so.
No sooner has she arrived than disturbing sights begin to sprout from the mansion’s walls, painted blood red (perhaps an all-too-obvious sign of things to come). It opens with the appearance of Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear), her corny-mouthed landlord, whose bumbling mannerisms and slightly uncolored jokes can hide threatening intentions.
Then, during a video call with her friend Riley (Glow’s Gayle Rankin, who’s underused here), Harper’s phone screen stutters in an instant—and you’ll miss it—jump scare, warping into a Lovecraftian swamp of flesh and blood—an eerie, misshapen pair of lips locked in an eternal scream.
That glitch teases a connection to Garland’s earlier films — imaginary sci-fi parables that deal with the dystopian implications of technological advancement. In the British director’s Oscar-nominated Ex Machina (2014), a gifted, macho type from Silicon Valley develops the perfect fembot prototype.
In its sequel, an atmospheric adaptation of the critically acclaimed sci-fi saga Annihilation (2018), Natalie Portman stars as a biologist who leads a group of female commandos into a mysterious zone called “the Shimmer,” where their military weapons are defenseless. against an inexplicable force penetrating their bodies.
Garland’s last one, however, is somewhat of a left turn. Like Ex Machina and Annihilation, it’s a chamber music piece – it isolates the characters in a rural sanctuary that turns nightmarish, letting them unravel the gnarled despair that plagues them. But one chooses the sci-fi tropics down in favor of something more sinister.
It fits right in with the recent spate of so-called lofty horror movies, which use the sticky gore of their predecessors as metaphors for greater existential dread.
Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar are the cornerstones of this genre, offering grand musings on family dysfunction and relationship problems. Closer to home, Australian films Relic and cult favorite The Babadook have also told twisting tales of intergenerational trauma and motherhood in ghostly, skin-crawling fashion.
And with a title like that, One could only be a horror movie.
Unfortunately, the title is also where it seems to reside.
Compared to his peers, Men’s attempt at lofty horror feels wafer-thin. Film doesn’t have to have a political manifesto—it can remain purely sensory, of course—but Garland bludgeons us over the head with a bloody obvious manifesto: All men are the same, and all men are bad.
Like a heart-to-heart intoxicated in a nightclub bathroom, you can almost hear Garland cheering “men are garbage!” while grinning to himself. As if this is a new idea for anyone born in the last century.
He hammers home his point by enlisting Kinnear to play – alongside Geoffrey – an assortment of male tormentors.
There is a naked man chasing Harper in the background of shots as a satanic Where’s Wally. There is an inept police officer who arrests the stalker and then releases it. There’s a young boy—a digitally aged Kinnear, as creepy as he is cherubic—who wrangles with Harper outside a local church and, out of the blue, calls her a “stupid bitch.”
To his credit, Kinnear’s performance approaches the virtuoso, as he transmutes with little more than an adjustment in costume or accent in a plethora of villains.
Buckley, too, is in typically good shape, just off a critically acclaimed twist in last year’s thorny drama The Lost Daughter. As Harper, she is outraged and fearless, although her eyes often betray a silent despair as the horrors around her draw closer.
And, of course, she’s great at screaming.
But Garland misuses both of his cues to understand #MeToo relevance, while providing only a superficial screed against misogyny.
A shame, because One contains the core of many intriguing ideas.
In an early scene, familiar to anyone who has seen the trailer, Harper calls into an endless tunnel, her voice bouncing off the mossy rims to form a strangely symphonic melody. When she returns to the tunnel minutes later, she finds it boarded up, in a state of disrepair.
Did a wrinkle appear in time? Are we witnessing the collapse of Harper’s grasp of reality? Garland chooses to completely ignore these narrative threads.
There’s also a plethora of visually stunning images: James’ death, repeating itself like a penetrating memory; a stone carving of the Green Man, a leafy folk figure and mythical symbol of rebirth who recast Garland as an evil presence. Each time it appears, it is accompanied by a ghostly trick of the light and a wailing, discordant score by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow.
Without sufficient substantiation, however, these images feel too abstracted and look more like a gimmicky show reel than a movie.
Indeed, men teeter precariously on the brink of self-parody.
As it climbs to a bloody finale, complete with mutilated limbs and a murderous hide-and-seek, the only appropriate response is a stifled fit of laughter at the sheer, senseless absurdity of it all.
We could think of it as a satire of lofty horror, a genre that so permeates the market that the latest imitators, because of their ubiquity, merge into one bloody mass. But that would probably be too generous.
They are now playing in the cinema.
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