Men is a home horror brew, imperfect for its load of figurative tropes but pleasing to the metaphoric obsessions of an English major who loves allegory. Auteur Alex Garland has crafted a film so enjoyably horrific and thematically loaded as to please those tired of goody-two shoes super-heroes and limitless CGI.
This intense treatise on the wrong's men do to women uses the standard object of fear, a single woman, Harper (Jessie Buckley), in a secluded English Cotswold cottage mending a heart devastated by the death (or suicide) of her husband, James (Paapa Essiedu). Various men enter her life, not one redeemable and most just downright ugly even when they physical aren't.
The predominantly evil alpha male is a naked middle-aged man with scars to scare, who stalks her in a tunnel on the path and back to her house, even after the police roust him out but have to let him out. Even a seemingly benign local prelate has sexist views about her driving her husband to suicide, so she seems to have no protector except another female on a smart phone 4 hours away. Harper is alone with demented men, a perfect scenario for the horror-flick formula.
Garland has done a yeoman's job larding his tale with symbols right down to when he offers pagan imagery of green men and Sheela-Na-Gigs, which help counter the misanthropy in favor of the men, who are misogynists. In effect, Garland has spent an entire film deriding the men but finds women also with some horrific responsibility.
You're not quite sure what I mean when I characterize Garland as sated with symbols? Consider this obvious allegory: As Harper arrives at the cottage, she spies an apple tree from which she plucks and eats an apple, only to be chided by the owner, Jeff (Rory Kinnear).
As a former English major, I delighted in the figurative gymnastics and multiple themes. However, the final birth scenes are almost too graphic for most women to stomach, much less delicate English major men. But the stuff of hard-core horror the images are.
Anyway, if you're a female, you may enjoy the men in Men as stalking, walking misogynists, and if you're a male, just run and hide, but not in the Cotswolds.
