There are moments in “Men” that may trigger your breath to quicken and your coronary heart to pound. Nonetheless, others will depart you scratching your head and stifling laughter.
No matter what your response is to the most recent meticulously made thoughts warp from author/director Alex Garland, it gained’t be indifference. It is visceral expertise, and it reinforces Garland’s singular prowess as a craftsman of indelible visuals and gripping temper. As in his earlier movies, “Ex Machina” and “Annihilation,” he establishes a sense of dread early and holds you in it, unyielding, for a lot of the movie’s period. The methodical pacing, eerie cinematography, startling sound design, and vivid visible results all work in synergy to create a virtually cruel pressure. However, then we attain his wild, muscular climax—and that’s the place issues in the end collapse.
“Men” is at its mightiest as a haunting exploration of grief, because it trudges an arduous street towards therapeutic. The English countryside the place our heroine seeks refuge after a horrifying loss appears peaceable and alluring. The plush woods are quiet and funky, as they so typically are in Garland’s movies—till they aren’t. The stately manor she’s rented provides far extra space than she wants—till she has nowhere to cover. Jessie Buckley navigates the numerous perils that await her character, Harper, with an unease that finally rises to terror. Her emotions are all there on the floor, and he or she’s dragging us alongside her as she fights for her sanity in addition to her security. There’s an honesty and immediacy to her efficiency—to her display screen presence basically—that maintain us hanging on whilst “Men” turns into more and more unfocused.
Harper has escaped to this idyllic village after experiencing a profound tragedy, which we witness in mesmerizing sluggish movement beneath orangey, stormy skies at the movie’s begin. However though she’s pushed 4 hours exterior her house in London, it doesn’t take long for her to find that she’s positioned herself in the middle of a special type of trauma. There’s one thing mistaken with this place, with these individuals, who all occur to be … males. One specific man, to be extra exact, in quite a lot of kinds. He’s the caretaker, the vicar, the bartender, the policeman, and—in his most annoying kinds—the bare stalker and the surly teenager. (The facial CGI on that child appears to be deliberately imperfect to make him much more off-putting than the remainder.) He’s Rory Kinnear, a longtime character actor exhibiting his spectacular versatility in a big selection of roles. Hair and make-up results permit him to imagine every new character distinctly, however, he all the time maintains an unmistakably menacing air. As a result, regardless of who this man is, he lets her down—or worse—time and again. Whether or not it’s a dismissal or a sexist insult, a passive-aggressive comment, or a straight-up aggressive assault, he simply retains coming, every incarnation extra harmful than the final. How Harper offers with the onslaught turns into her personal private hell—and ours.
There’s a line we cross in “Men” the place it turns into clear we’ve left actuality solely. For some time, it’s potential that Harper’s simply paranoid, as in a single quietly highly effective scene wherein she sends her voice echoing playfully down an empty tunnel, solely to find that maybe it’s not empty in spite of everything. However, in time, we’re in a full-on hallucination zone, and dazzlingly so. “Men” buzzes and builds to a frenzy in methods that can be harking back to Darren Aronofsky’s “mother!”, which divided audiences the way in which Garland’s movie certainly will. Working together with his traditional cinematographer, Rob Hardy, and composers, Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury, in addition to editor Jake Roberts, Garland creates a symphony of managed chaos.
And but, whereas the movie’s technical excellence is without query, the themes Garland is exploring are a bit hazier. What’s he making an attempt to say concerning the trials ladies should stand up to inside the patriarchy? He introduces biblical imagery early and infrequently: Harper actually plucks an apple from a tree within the backyard and takes a chunk upon arrival on the manor. Is he suggesting that nothing has been modified in 2,000-plus years of male-female relations? Later nonetheless, he inserts some ritualistic pagan imagery to hammer house that we’re certainly watching old-school, ‘70s British folk horror, if nothing else. And how does all this relate to the film’s surprising, graphic, and downright weird conclusion, which retains going and going to the extent that it conjures up unintentional laughter? Bringing these concepts into sharper focus would have given them much more energy. As an alternative, they meander and sprawl, remaining intriguing however tantalizingly out of attaining.
Nonetheless, that is the stuff of nightmares, and Garland reveals your issues right here that you simply by no means be capable to unsee—however you’ll get pleasure from discussing them afterward with a buddy over espresso or a drink. The lobbies of arthouse theaters worldwide are positive to be full of individuals wandering from their auditoriums in a daze, questioning what they simply witnessed and wishing desperately to make sense of it. So possibly “Men” are good for one thing in spite of everything: They could simply save cinema.