Direction: Alex Garland
Country: UK
Following two successful sci-fi thrillers (Ex Machina, 2014; Annihilation, 2018), The British writer-director Alex Garland shifts his focus to the folk horror genre with Men, a vertiginously styled pic with a lot to admire and think about. The film is loaded with dark mysticism, hair-raising choral music, haunting images, and a negative energy that puts you alert at all times.
The disturbing story, which opens and closes with Lesley Duncan’s beautiful “Love Song”, follows Harper (Jessie Buckley), a haunted woman seeking peace and some spiritual healing after the death of her husband, James (Paapa Essiedu). Crushed by painful memories, she decides to travel solo and rent an old manor in the Southwest rural region of England. Once arrived, she finds a group of weird men (brilliantly performed by Rory Kinnear), each of them embodying a perfectly identifiable male archetype. They all seem to want a piece of her soul, and scary visions succeed one after another, making us restless.
Metaphor and symbology - most of it related to rebirth/reproduction - are present everywhere in a work of immense and intense emotional vigor that opposes misogyny with Spartan sturdiness. The film takes you to really creepy places but the inscrutable, deranged denouement, despite being suffused with grotesque and creative imagery, leaves you in a sort of suspended state; a sort of agonizing and exciting enigma. I experienced the same feeling with films by David Lynch, Peter Strickland and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The logic of things is left open to debate, but I would add that Garland missed the very final note of a grandiose symphony. He wanted so badly to take the film to certain extremes that he impaired it at the last minute by not giving a plausible resolution to the story.
However, the qualities we find here - the score/sound design by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury (a combination of eerie, ethereal and penetrating sounds) is absolutely phenomenal - easily overcome the quibbles. Whether this cryptic nightmare is your cup of tea or not, it’s very hard to ignore it.
