MEN

6,5 / 10

After having witnessed a man’s fatal jump off a multi-storied apartment located at the London River Thames, Harper Marlowe (Jessie Buckley) decides to drive to the distant village Cotson to cope with the harrowing pictures of the incident and its aftermath. As she arrives at her rented house, she is welcomed by the owner Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear) who guides her through the rooms. Harper is relatively relieved about the distance from the metropolis London and takes a walk through the beautifully captured and slightly wet terrains of the Northern home county Hertfordshire. Eventually, she finds a long, abandoned train tunnel and starts to shout differently pitched tones through it. The tones evolve into a lone choir which she becomes fascinated by, but her immersion comes to a halt as a mysterious, male-shaped body arises at the other end of the tunnel. A female scream out of nowhere emerges and the man starts running towards her. Harper quickly escapes from the place and discovers more mysterious men staring at her in the forest and the village. The relaxing holiday trip in the northern woods slowly changes into a stalker-induced nightmare which confronts her past and questions her involvement in the lead-up to the man’s suicide jump.

At first glance, MEN comes off as a slow-burn horror thriller driven by smart, acoustic cues, multiple religious symbolizations and positions Harper Marlowe front and center just as much as her opposed gender infiltrates her stay. She tries to contemplate the suicide event and goes through a process of grief, but it gets interrupted by the creepy men lurking around almost everywhere and stare at her with a look full of scrutiny and reproach. The reason lies in actor Rory Kinnear who not only plays the quirky owner Geoffrey, but also every male citizen of Cotson, including a scary, though subpar deepfake onto an incel-behaving school kid. His face functions like a projector for the resentment and condescendence against women or Harper in this particular case. They don’t really talk with her, but more about her. The vicar of Cotson’s church is the most audacious of them: As Harper starts to talk with him about the suicide, he acts as a counselor, but constantly brings on the possibility that it cannot just be the man’s decision to jump into death and that she should have forgiven him which could have prevented this event. The variations of Geoffrey construct a blame game which wants to force Harper into showing empathy for the dead man by taking responsibility and being held accountable, which basically means the acceptance of a subordinate role to the man. It’s a mental walk on a slackline for Harper from grief to the letting go of the tragedy while being chased by paranoia caused by the male villager’s oppressive nature.

She is being forced into a corner and the victimization becomes clear, but director Alex Garland refuses to show the full picture of the past. Throughout the story, he weaves in small flashbacks about Harper’s conflict with the man. The origin for their heated exchanges is deeply missed. Instead, we see a relationship at its terminal stage: An accumulation of anger, despair and a total disconnect between the two, topped off with the man threatening to kill himself in order to keep up their current relationship status. Needless to say that any sort of physical violence to a very likely end of a relationship is unacceptable, but leaving out the beginning of their altercation makes Harper’s emotional fundament and standpoint unnecessarily unstable. The unelaborated backstory leads to a state in which Harper looks disoriented and potentially imagines the fear of being stalked. It’s one of the various emotions which Jessie Buckley superbly presents. She and Rory Kinnear do a wonderful job by portraying the two sides. She gets suspicious about Geoffrey early on and is frightened by the appearance of the Green Man or disgusted about the vicar and the passive-aggressive looking policeman.

Her journey of grief becomes an act of self-defense. Garland amps up the intensity of the horror culminating in an incredibly disgusting final sequence and Harper’s mimics show the repulse and resistance against the recurring toxic masculinity. Much like his previous Annihilation, which shows a fusion and a starting connection of nature and human with an extra-terrestrial lifeform, Garland fuses the suicide’s circumstances with Harper’s paranoid thoughts and vision in and around Cotson to create an ultimate form of fear and suppression embodied in Rory Kinnear’s naked man. Can this form be stopped in any certain way? That’s where the blame game comes in: Should she acknowledge the suicide jump? Can she be held accountable for the “manipulation” of his state of mind which causes his decision? Is the blame game a part of her own mind reflecting on the incident or is it triggered by the men’s persuasive behavior?

In the end, you cannot really tell whether everything is a byproduct of Harper’s trauma causing this deeply mental tale about grief and male oppression or not. However, one cannot deny that the toxic masculinity isn’t real. Acknowledgement as an act of love and responsibility is a silly assumption made by the men in the film. Who needs the love? Who needs empathy? The film clearly steps into the woman’s shoes and presents the constant threat that comes from toxic masculinity. Any other answer will conclude with the term gaslighting. With Harper’s victim role, love and empathy are in her favor, but there’s also an urge that her position could have been strengthened with a more detailed backstory. MEN is a body horror presentation of PTSD caused by male terror and their objectification of women and is disturbing in both its visuals and the underlying manipulative energy erupting out of the darkness.