The corpse is oddly bent and dented, punctured and torn. It’s definitely a human being lying there half impaled against a cast-iron fence after falling from the attractive London apartment. He looks like Harper’s (Jessie Buckley) estranged husband, but seems about to be falling apart. In the course of Men, the new film directed by Alex Garland (Ex Machina), he will be put together again, but with a different face. He will look like Rory Kinnear, who plays several men in a pretty English village, all with one thing in mind: terrorizing Harper.
Alex Garland crafts the surreal processing of this death as a horrifying horror trip with a surprising amount of humor and an unforgettable ending. Men is already one of the best horror movies of the year.
In Men, pure horror ruins the idyllic nature
After the death of James (Paapa Essiedu), Harper seeks clarity and variety in a majestic English country house. The grass shines in a lush green on your first hike. Nature abounds with dreadfulness. A new life cycle begins. Maybe for Harper too. Then a man stands at the end of a tunnel. He shouts.
Check out the trailer for Men:
Men – Trailer (German) HD
He is the first of many men in Men, the holiday in a disturbing hall of mirrors transform. Everywhere you look, Rory Kinnear’s eyes are on you. It speaks for the actor and the production how eerily concrete the gaze of Kinnear’s men on the only woman in the area seems. That look alone gave me the all too familiar and all too feminine feeling of walking down a dark street alone at night and hearing strange footsteps.
Alex Garland, who also wrote the screenplay, doesn’t stop at looks. Men is rapidly evolving into effective Home Invasion Horror, in which one of the men could be waiting behind each door to pounce on Jessie Buckley’s harper.
Garland is not stingy with humor when the bare kinnear like a running gag stands in front of the window while Harper unsuspectingly guides her friend through the house with her smartphone. Or when vacation rental owner Geoffrey, the most memorable of Kinnear’s men, spat out one amusing quip after another. Men offers a surprising amount of laughs for an Alex Garland film, especially when compared to his recent losing work, the Netflix film Annihilation and the sci-fi series Devs.
Thanks to Jessie Buckley, Men skilfully combines drama and horror film
Garland’s new film is reduced, almost archaic and enriches its horror with primeval motifs. If Harper bites into a forbidden apple after arrival like Eva, it has the same effect Initiation rite into an ancient world with equally traditional resentments against femininity.
However, Men shows his strengths less in the big statement about the physical and psychological violence that women suffer at the hands of men. But rather in the personal history, carried by a touching feisty Jessie Buckley. After Woman in the Dark, she is proving herself once again as one of the most exciting actresses in English-language film right now.
Alongside Kinnear’s virtuoso multiple villain, Buckley grounds the horror film. Even in the nightmarish finale that unites the two hearts of the film, horror and drama, magnificently united. Then everything that was previously in separate pieces merges into a very simple yet disturbing picture – for Harper and for us.