Graphic by Claire Evans
Warning: This review/thinkpiece will contain spoilers for Men (2022).
“Men” is a movie that tells you exactly what it’s about. It oozes prestige from every pore — the advertisements are rife with acclaimed character actors and a lush embrace of the aesthetic qualities that can be found in the British countryside. In the trailer, the echo of musical voices is easily haunting, and each injection of the movie’s imagery (stones, falling apples, a dude in a mask, the whole nine yards) might appear very promising. Nothing cohesive, yes, but that’s what the 100-minute runtime is for: filling in the blanks behind that three-minute preview.
As someone who sat in that movie theater with a jumbo popcorn and a smuggled cup of boba tea, I can assure you the film puts most of its good ideas into the trailer. The rest ends up being half-baked ideas that could be good but never really come to fruition.
“Men” could have been successful. I believe that there is a market for prestige horror, one that has been very effectively cultivated in the past few years. What I can’t help from wondering, then, is why it failed so spectacularly at being anything but a visual celebration of the British countryside that showcases how good Jessie Buckley is at saying “fuck” under her breath.
To start, let’s address the elephant in the room that comes up nearly every time that I discuss this movie: “Men” is written by a man. It is directed by a man. It was produced by two men. It was edited by another man.
Just from this roster, this movie was always going to have trouble with its point of view.
Jessie Buckley, who stars in the movie as Harper, appears to be very talented, but it’s hard to breathe any sort of life into a character that expresses no personality traits aside from having suffered serious trauma. The film takes place from her perspective, but we are never even told what her job is. For a movie that speaks about listening to women and treating them as humans, it is an immediate, massive oversight to place the weight of the movie on a character that has zero material. Writer and director Alex Garland neglects the aspects of the main character that don’t involve her trauma, failing to take any time to define who Harper is outside of her relationship with men. This exact misstep is louder than any message about gender that the movie is trying to get across, and its effects echo through the rest of the film. Hypocrisy is a curse that reigns over the entire movie, and it only gets worse when you think about it.
The interesting thing, however, is that Garland does say some really interesting things about men; but since the perspective of Harper is so clouded, none of it comes across as meaningful in any way.
For example, in the evil town that Harper visits, every single man she meets is played by the same actor. There are visual differences between them, but the effect is unsettling as the audience slowly pieces together that it’s all one force behind the town. One could read this as a visual representation of the idea that all men are the same — that they share some way of being. It’s like a monster movie, where a heroine will be saved, only to discover that the savior is actually a Man, who then betrays her. It’s an interesting idea! Is this a way of saying that toxic masculinity is like a curse as much as it’s a community, where they are all the same monster, for better or for worse?
But then, inevitably, the idea fails because the lens through which we are getting this message is incomplete, lacking much perception of what’s happening. Harper, it seems, is always in the dark, so we never get a stated realization that maybe, deep down, all men are the same. We never see it clearly, so we never talk about it. It’s a failure and a tragedy.
That being said, I’m a film optimist. I have no moral aversion to announcing that artists might do well to take “Men,” break it apart and harvest it for its artistic pieces. When I watch “Men” and when I think about it, all that comes to mind is a better movie that can be made from its half-baked ideas. Take, for example, the infamous and deeply unpopular scene in which the monster births itself a few times. There’s a really interesting idea in there, I think, about a horror that comes from passing something down through generations, over and over and right in front of you. A legacy of evil. That’s interesting. Someone should write a movie about that — and I don’t think it should be Alex Garland.
There’s absolutely a space for these kinds of slow simmer horror movies (maybe with a slow tension build like “The Assistant”) that use cues from conversations about modern-day issues to hook the audience into the horror. The next time I sit down in the theater to watch that story unfold, I hope the ideas aren’t left half-baked. It would be even better if the baker doesn’t include super convoluted visual metaphors about “seed.”