Men will hit theaters on May 20, 2022.
Men, the A24 horror movie from Alex Garland, is unfortunate both as an individual work that crashes and burns, and as a follow-up to the writer-director’s sci-fi exploration of trauma and self-destructiveness: the modern masterpiece Annihilation. His new work tackles a few similar themes, repackaging them as isolated folk-horror that proves initially effective (thanks to its lead performances, and a few visual evocations of Lars Von Trier). However, it soon begins to take a thuddingly literal approach to even its most esoteric and abstract ideas, all but explaining them to the camera during scenes where mood and tension begin to feel like afterthoughts. What starts out as an intimate, eerie piece eventually feels like an exercise in self-indulgence, albeit the kind that inspires shrugs and yawns rather than enrapturement, awe, or even the intended discomfort.
The film begins with tragedy, as Harper (Jessie Buckley), her nose bloody and her eyes glazed over in thought, kicks back to attention as a man, James (Paapa Essiedu), falls past her apartment window. For a brief second, their eyes seem to meet, though the specifics of this tale are later revealed to be more complicated than mere happenstance. Sometime later, Harper drives to the lush English countryside where much of the story is set, and where she rents a quiet, rustic cabin to get away for a while. Its owner, Geoffrey (an unrecognizable Rory Kinnear), smiles with uncannily shaped teeth as he shows her around, jesting on the edge of over-familiarity. Perhaps he’s harmless, but the silent beats between his jokes leave lingering doubts.
As Harper explores the nearby village and its winding woods, Garland and his cinematographer Rob Hardy craft a haunting atmosphere that smuggles paranoia into the frame, via shots where the spaces around beaten paths and old tunnels don’t quite feel right; at one point, an establishing shot seems to be slightly tilt-shifted, messing with your perspective. Before long, what unsettles Harper isn’t just her new surroundings — which she had hoped would be a respite from the disturbing things she’s seen — but the various men of the village, each a wildly different “type” with a different appearance, but each played by Kinnear, as he delivers a masterclass in the number of different ways you can creep someone out with just a glare.
In their interactions with Harper, the village denizens ride a fine line between unassuming and sinister, resulting in a first half in which Men brims with mistrust. This initial half also slowly reveals Harper’s past, via flashbacks which seem to paralyze her in the present, allowing Buckley to once again stray in and out of attention as we learn more about who James was to her, and how and why he died. By framing its story around moments such as these, in which Buckley loses herself in the past — while superficially akin to a robot entering and exiting sleep mode, they’re the film’s most achingly human element — the story becomes about how Harper’s traumatic past still ripples and manifests around her. The men of the village are part and parcel of these manifestations, painting an intricate picture of the ways most women are forced to experience a world created by men and dominated by their gaze, which gives rise to the aforementioned paranoia. Even when shadows in the present wear a wildly different face from the specters of the past, their spiritual connection remains.
Garland’s concentrated societal microcosm also has a distinctly theological tone, which at first offers hints about its subtext. The flashbacks in Harper’s apartment are awash in sunlight filtered through warm curtains, giving these scenes a distinctly red appearance, as if she’s recalling having lived through hell, while the bright greenery of the countryside is her escape into paradise. It is, however, quickly corrupted when she takes a bite of a wild apple from the cabin’s garden, imbuing the picturesque setting with even more Biblical undertones — though ones that are immediately and explicitly explained. It’s a minor occurrence, but it sets the stage for the ways in which the film begins to slip, even as it further contextualizes societal structures (like religion and policing) as hostile towards women.
These hostilities are immediately effective when they weave their way into mundane conversations, despite the fact that Kinnear’s appearance as several side characters, each with their own ill-fitting wig, is often ridiculous (among them, a young boy who has Kinnear’s de-aged face pasted onto his body, though its uncanniness is effective). Let’s just say that Kinnear understood the assignment(s), playing various men to whom the title seemingly refers, each meant to embody both explicit and implicit aggressions against Harper. At times, he’s downright chilling. Buckley is mesmerizing in her role as well, between Harper’s anguish over her past experiences, which often bubbles to the surface, and the control she’s often forced to exert over it just to survive. As a singular piece about the ways gendered traumas manifest, these elements work like a charm — but when Men begins to step foot into more overtly horror territory, it quickly collapses in on itself.
Every aesthetic element that initially soars is eventually recontextualized, in service of a story whose abstractions don’t quite work once the scenes around them take a more literal bent. The more ethereal its metaphors become — for instance, the reappearance of Kinnear in different forms — the less that its tangible, slasher-esque chases seem to work, since they become increasingly about slick movement between physical places (and movement in and out of shadows) rather than holding on the phantasmagorical. It’s one jump-scare too many for a film that’s much better at initially unnerving you, slowly and steadily, than it is at startling you the same way over and over again as it dovetails towards its ending. Its plot operates on too literal a level for its haunting imagery to stick in the mind, and it soon becomes hard to take it seriously when the many silly-looking Kinnears are meant to be imposing in a classical horror movie monster sense. No amount of disruptive, disconnected vignettes with garish lighting can complement them either (let alone enhance them), and by the end, they only serve to distract from any semblance of building tension.
It certainly doesn’t help that the Christian imagery amounts to very little beyond broad references, despite the constant presence of churches and vicars, several visual allusions to Christian theology, and even stray gestures towards a Madonna-whore dichotomy (which has little psychological or aesthetic bearing beyond a few fleeting interactions). It’s all window-dressing. Even once Men’s images start to feel unique — its notions about the rebirth and perpetuation of masculine social norms take genuinely sickening physical form — its most jolting and stomach-churning ideas soon lose their muster through brutal overexposure, and through haphazardly literal explanations about why certain metaphors take the shape they do. It’s as if someone behind the scenes had forced Garland & co. to ensure that no viewer left the theater with anything less than a detailed, closed-ended understanding of what his images are trying to say, even if this means essentially pausing the movie so characters can interpret it in their own words.
Despite its aesthetic flourishes, the end result is a deeply utilitarian film. One where meaning is told rather than felt, and where moving pictures, even at their most visceral and inventive, end up in service of bullet points about a woman’s perspective, rather than an artistic extrapolation of it — rather than poetry spoken in tongues until it creeps beneath your skin, a language Garland has spoken before.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/yj5fd2O
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