David Farnor | On 05, Jan 2023

Director: Alex Garland
Cast: Jessie Buckley, Rory Kinnear
Certificate: 15

Men, eh? Aren’t they the worst? That, in many ways, is the main takeaway from Alex Garland’s Men, a folk horror that follows a woman as she gos on holiday only to be disturbed by a gaggle of men in the strange village. It’s an unnerving, unsettling experience – but it’s also one that leaves you wishing for something a little more substantial.

It’s not often that Alex Garland could be accused of making something shallow. The Sunshine and Dredd writer has only become more ambitious and nuanced since he stepped up to the helm, directing the provocative AI thriller Ex Machina and the profound sci-fi Annihilation, not to mention the thoughtful, existential series Devs. Men, though, is a surprisingly underwhelming affair.

The film follows Harper (Jessie Buckley), a woman who looks for an escape from her life after her marriage to James (Paapa Essiedu) reaches a tragic denouement. But her countryside getaway in a rural house descends into spooky weirdness, thanks to the creepy local male population. She’s given the tour by Geoffrey, played with mild-mannered goofishness by a game Rory Kinnear. Soon after, she finds herself watched and followed by another man (also Rory Kinnear), harassed by another figure (Kinnear) and not helped very much by a bemused police officer (Kinnear again).

The repeated casting of Kinnear highlights just how versatile a talent he is, as he sinks his teeth into differents kinds of pernicious behaviour. Buckley, meanwhile, is a force to be reckoned with as the resilient Harper, who isn’t afraid to push back against trauma, just as she was able to stand up to James and call out his manipulative behaviour.

But no matter how slimy things get, each incident begins to feel repetitive rather than reiterative – a feeling not helped by the recurring casting of Kinnear. A bravura slice of body horror in the final act should feed into a dissection of the cyclical nature of toxic masculinity, but instead only highlights that the film doesn’t know what to say beyond observing the problem in the first place. As a film, Men isn’t the worst, but it could have been much more.

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