It doesn’t make sense to say that Men is a familiar movie. It’s not a normal movie. The story and visuals aren’t things I’ve seen a hundred times before. On paper, it’s wholly unique. But the feeling of watching it is one I recognize. There’s a genre of psychological horror – heavier on the psychological than the horror – that Men fits right into. Mother! Under the Skin, Resurrection. They can generally be described as “a woman in peril around a world that makes increasingly less sense”. Generally I’m a fan of these, although they are big swings. When someone dislikes one of these movies, they dislike them hard. That’s partly because there’s no way to advertise these. They look like horror, but someone going in, even for a Hereditary, is going to be greatly surprised.
Men has this problem. On its surface, it’s a horror movie about a woman (Jessie Buckley) escaping to the English countryside for a much-needed vacation who gets haunted by mysterious occurrences around her. Technically, all the scares are there, but the real focus is on trauma. She experienced a loss that she has complicated feelings about. This film is about her inability to get away from these feelings. Then throw in a healthy dose of body horror. Finally, there’s the confused humor of it all. The film plays on the idea that bluntness can be funny or scary. The less you know which, the more unsettling it is. Simply put, I was never sure when I should be laughing.
The way one experiences Men, from what I could tell, is this. It loses a lot of the audience while watching it and there’s no way to get them back on board. It’s not an inviting movie that way. It’s building to something, but it’s not a something designed to reel people back in. The rest of the audience stays with the movie in a constant state of curiosity. They wonder where this is going until the very end. Then, the movie ends. Another chunk the audience who thought the movie was magically going to come cleanly together angrily thinks “that’s it?” and dismisses the movie. The remaining audience is in sort of a daze, still piecing together how much they liked it. Some will end up loving it. Many will eventually drop it assuming they missed something in the director’s intent. Then end result is that in a few months, most people will remember that they hated the movie. Most of the rest will remember that it was weird and little else. Then a few will swear by it. That’s my prediction at least.
I’m struggling to talk about the movie in specifics, if you can tell. Jessie Buckley is good in it. She’s playing off no one most of the time and remains interesting to watch. Director Alex Garland has successfully pulled off this tone before (Ex Machina) and leans more into horror well. The damp English countryside is an underused location for unsettling films. There are a few wild effects that are successfully uncomfortable to look at. It’s the kind of movie I’d love to hear the director explain all his choices for it. I get the gist of what he was doing, but there’s a lot of window dressing on it, where the only function it serves is to look cool or creepy. There are times when I wanted it to just get to the point already. I have to imagine it how other people feel about a film like A Ghost Story. I happen to be dialed into the perfect wave length for that movie but I admit that it’s tedious for anyone who isn’t. I wasn’t quite on Men’s wavelength. It’s an interesting movie that didn’t totally work for me. I’m here for the vibes though.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
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