Writer-director Alex Garland‘s stratospheric rise has been remarkable to watch over the past decade-plus. After beginning his career as a screenwriter who frequently collaborated with Danny Boyle, Garland began to carve out a place for himself as a middle-to-high-brow shepherd of science fiction and action pictures that fit comfortably within the A24 wheelhouse and make decent money at the box office. This sensibility, which began with his 2014 directorial debut Ex Machina, has carried him through years of critically lauded work, and landed him the task of adapting Hidetaka Miyazaki and George R. R. Martin‘s gargantuan, surreal video game epic Elden Ring.
In 2022, though, Garland released his most divisive and shamelessly disreputable film — one that broke away from his signature style into something much gorier and funnier. Men is a horror picture that, on paper, shares much of its DNA with other A24 elevated horror films, with its luscious, vaguely haunted landscape shots, heavy-handed symbolism, and a menacing ambient score.
However, what distinguishes it from the rest of the grief-as-horror pack is its dedication to increasingly absurd and gruesome effects shots that owe a debt to the 1980s glory days of Brian Yuzna and Stuart Gordon. Men’s questionable aspirations toward deeper meaning aside, the film goes deeper and deeper into gory, ridiculous effects as it goes on. Its climax plays like something Yuzna could have dreamed up to include in the notorious finale of Society — and while many critics viewed it as a big swing-and-a-miss by a talented director, for the right kind of viewer, it’s a hell of a lot of fun to watch.
‘Men’ Plays With A24 Horror Tropes…Until It Doesn’t
For much of its runtime, Men could be mistaken for a parody of A24’s house horror style. It’s heavily, almost comically metaphorical as it follows the tribulations of Harper (Jessie Buckley), a young woman who flees London for the countryside after her abusive husband jumps to his death from their high rise. But rather than finding peace in her rural surroundings, she repeatedly encounters a sinister naked man who gradually becomes more and more plant-like in appearance, as well as an overbearing landlord, a disturbing youth who wants to play hide and seek, and a lecherous vicar — all played masterfully by Buckley’s sole co-star, Rory Kinnear. She also eats an apple from a tree without the landowner’s permission.
Harper is seeking escape, while also at least partially blaming herself for her husband’s suicide. But in her quest for inner peace, she instead finds only more predatory men. Even the vicar, who starts out understanding, eventually reverts to sexual violence in the finale. Garland is far from subtle with his message, poignant as it may be, and the film’s pace and the degree to which audiences can take it seriously do suffer.
But despite all the social critique, Garland’s heart seems to lie elsewhere, and once Men truly kicks off its blood-soaked climax, it doesn’t stop — and fans of creative gore effects are in for a treat.
‘Men’ Offers Wildly Gruesome 1980s-Style Thrills in Its Climax
At a certain point, Harper finds herself under siege by (apparently) the child played by Kinnear. She plunges a knife through the kid’s forearm as he’s reaching through her mail slot; he then proceeds to draw his arm back agonizingly slowly, splitting his forearm and hand vertically. It’s a truly wonderful effect — almost like something out of a latter-era Evil Dead film — and from here on out, the film is almost all gross-outs.
The moment in which the terrifying vicar sexually menaces Harper by using both sides of his split hand and forearm to grab her neck is both unsettling and hilarious, and belongs in one of Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator pictures. And once Kinnear’s multiple men begin giving birth to one another — starting with an anal birth — we are so clearly in Yuzna territory that we are even treated to feet emerging from a mouth in an explicit echo of Society‘s “shunting” sequence. Garland is having fun, and so is an audience looking for a break from the current glut of elevated horror.
It’s hard to express how refreshing the scuzzy, wet effects work of Men is, coming after what one may fear is a prototypical A24 horror film. As masterful as Ari Aster’s Hereditary is, fun is never even approached in the film, and its moments of fleeting gore evoke trauma more than delight. The finale of Men, with its glut of grotesque imagery and satisfying blend of practical effects and CGI, could redeem a far worse movie — but in an era when gleefully bloody imagery is hard to find, Men‘s psychedelically gruesome climax is truly something worth watching.
After the critical and financial successes of Civil War and Warfare (although audiences are sharply divided on the former), it’s highly unlikely that Garland will return to such disreputable territory again, which is a shame. However, given the fecund ground Miyazaki and Martin have laid with Elden Ring‘s vast bestiary, catalog of bodily torments, and stunning vistas, Garland has a chance to deliver on multiple fronts again. People grafting multiple limbs onto themselves, a disease that rots the body and channels an outer god, humans ground to paste and stuffed into jars that then become animate — the possibilities for phantasmagoria are endless. Here’s hoping that Garland returns to taking visual and visceral risks like he did with Annihilation and Men once more. It seems to be where he thrives.
- Release Date
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May 20, 2022
- Runtime
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100 minutes
- Director
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Alex Garland
