Men – Movie Review
100Minutes, Rated R
Written and Directed by Alex Garland

Synopsis:

A young woman goes on a solo vacation to the English countryside following the death of her ex-husband.

The man who brought us the cinematic science-fiction epics Ex Machina and Annihilation, along with the equally wacky television series Devs, returns to the big screen with Men, a new take on psychological trauma.

This one is best described as a critical darling, but that is probably stretching the phrase a bit farther than it’s used to.

A great many critics acknowledge that Men is, indeed, something, but what that something is is up for debate.

What begins as a somewhat typical tale of a woman recovering from a back relationship that ended as badly as it possibly could have, slowly and methodically devolves into something else… something darker and more sinister.

Jesse Buckley is Harper, who retreats to a 500-plus-year-old manor house in the idyllic English countryside to recover from what we learn all-too-quickly is the death of her husband, who fell to a gruesome death from the balcony of the apartment above theirs following a fight in which she locked him out.

During a walk in the woods surrounding the house and the nearby village, she encounters a Man who begins to chase her, and she blazes a trail through the woods, finding herself at a collection of abandoned buildings occupied by a naked man who simply stares at her as she scuttles away, frightened after the previous encounter, and perhaps embarrassed by the sight of a naked old man.

Later, as she talks on the phone with her friend back in London, she spots the naked man–still naked, mind you–in the garden eating apples off the tree and staring at her.

A quick call gets the police out to arrest him, and she finds herself at the local pub, where she encounters Geoffrey, the landlord, and a few locals, and eventually the policeman who arrested the naked man, who informs her that they had to release him because apparently in England wandering through someone’s garden naked isn’t grounds to be held.

But whatever.

A later break-in attempt sends Harper farther into a self-loathing spiral in which she feels she can’t take care of herself…

…and then shit goes completely off the rails.

First, by the time the third act starts, we’ve recognized (though Harper hasn’t) that all the Men she encounters in the village are Rory Kinnear in some make-up or other (including the naked Man), which is the central point the film is making, which is basically “all Men are the same.”
Whether you agree with that or not is entirely up to you.

Of course, all the talk is about the final sequence, which could generously be described as a metaphorical depiction of the generational nature of the patriarchy and its subjugation of women,

But really, it’s just fucking weird as hell.

But 100% unforgettable.

I enjoyed Men, but it is certainly not for everyone. You’ll need to have an open mind and maybe an empty stomach to get through this one, but it’s definitely worth seeing at least once.

Men is in theaters now and stars Jesse Buckley, Rory Kinnear, Rory Kinnear, Rory Kinnear, and Rory Kinnear.

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