02/06/2022 - CANNES 2022: Alex Garland has seen hell in his latest work, and it turns out to be a quaint English village where every man is Rory Kinnear

Alex Garland’s new work Men [+see also:
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series profile] have used the tropes and conventions of horror films to reflect on ideas about trauma, gaslighting and gender roles, ever conscious of how the genre has been used to misogynist ends in the past. With Men, Garland – awkwardly and squarely, albeit sincerely – has stepped into an orthodox horror template to vent some of his own ideas, although he already insightfully broached these subjects in Annihilation and Ex Machina [+see also:
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film profile]. After the film was released in the USA a fortnight ago, Garland enjoyed his first Cannes appearance last month, with Men showing as a Special Screening in the Directors’ Fortnight.

Men has a modesty and defensiveness about it, facing down a big, divisive subject but flinching away from offering too provocative a statement. The cast list is composed of just four actors, and they interact sparingly, in spite of the fact that all of them are excellent in the film. And, with the world progressing from the pandemic-era new normal back to something resembling the old one, it will be one of the last new movies to premiere shot under more stringent COVID-19 filming restrictions (principal photography ended just as mass vaccination was being taken up), although it uses them in a more intuitive way than much of what we’ve seen this past year. To use a music-world analogy, Men has the feel of a quick EP released between grander, album-length statements, but it’s a rewarding little experiment.

The logline is almost stock, but Garland turns this into something of a virtue. Harper (the great Jessie Buckley) has retreated to a placid English shire town in shock, after her abusive and mentally struggling husband James (Paapa Essiedu) has died, perhaps from suicide. Whilst there, all of the expected cheery yet eccentric locals are seen – the landlord, the village vicar, the local bobby et al – yet they’re all played, quite deftly, by Rory Kinnear, giving a multi-part performance that recalls Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets, rather than any Mike Myers-style broadness.

And that’s basically it. The film’s arc proceeds with Harper meeting each of these “men” (only the unctuous landlord, Geoffrey, is given a name), and whilst not noting their facial resemblances, she does gauge their absolute toxicity, unpleasantness and the threat they pose. More cutting than the dig that “all men are the same” is the idea that male behaviour can be bottled into one entity or set of traits, and that Kinnear’s characters manifest every aspect, all to create an ordeal for Harper and her confidante Riley (Gayle Rankin), a friend only seen in FaceTime messages until the final scene.

Garland perceptively shows how the breakdown of a heterosexual relationship might give each half of the couple a suspicion and allergy towards the other gender. But he stops short of really examining the patriarchy through anything other than a generalised metaphor, and it hurts the overall potency of his film, however beautifully made it is.

Men is a UK-US co-production, staged by DNA Films and A24.