Men was belittled by more than a few critics, who lambasted it for an overly-simplistic message of popcorn misandry. But there is much more at play here than Alex Garland simply trotting out the cliché that all men are the same.
It took me more than 18 months to finally sit through Alex Garland’s Men – but I find it fitting that I finally managed to complete it on the cusp of the winter solstice. Despite its luscious, green backdrop – an endless horizon of leafy oaks and clear skies – it feels to me like it belongs in the proud tradition of A Ghost Story for Christmas.
For one thing, it toys mercilessly with our expectations of what such a landscape should offer, through lead character’s interaction with it. Like the protagonist of many an M.R. James adaptation, Harper Marlowe (Jessie Buckley) arrives in the remote village of Cotson hoping to extract herself from the vicious noise of modern life – to buy herself some time and space in which she might collect her thoughts.
Spoilers ahead!
Through flashbacks, we are told that the driving force behind Harper’s decision was the death of James – her abusive husband. Harper had intended to divorce him – after suffering emotional abuse and manipulation. In a final confrontation with James, in which Harper announces her plans to divorce him, he threatens to commit suicide. This is a tactic which it is suggested worked before, but this time Harper stands her ground. In a bid to find a new mode of control, his abuse turns physical – but rather than cowing her into submission, it catalyses her defiance, and she locks him out of their apartment. Harper then witnesses James falling from a neighbour’s balcony to his death – leading to his body being partially impaled on a fence below.
It is unclear exactly why he fell. While Harper suggests that he might have been trying to gain entry back into their apartment via the balcony window, she is also plagued by thoughts that he had gone through with his threat to end his life, if she did not take him back. In Cotson, she hopes to finally find the space to clear her head – and initially, it seems to work.
There are shades of A View from A Hill and Whistle and I’ll Come to You in the early stages of Harper’s getaway. Long trudges through the near-silent countryside offer up many delights: peaceful imagery of pristine leafy woodland; clear bursts of fresh rainfall; a deserted church filled with the pre-Christian iconography of the Green Man and the Sheela na gig; and a cavernous abandoned railway tunnel. Buckley’s performance amid all of this is one of gradual levity – distanced from the hell from which she has escaped, her face seems to lighten as her character finally finds the time to enjoy her own company again. Even the echoing tunnel, which might seem ominous on first sight, comes to feel reassuring. This is a place where modernity could not penetrate – and where its failed attempts to breach the peace have been severed and reclaimed by an ancient state of nature. And for a moment, we are also caught up in this intoxicating feeling of being safe in this blanket of silence and seclusion.
But having established this supposedly safe space, Garland’s script is set to gradually turn it on its head – and re-tool this isolation to torment his protagonist, and audience. Because as the distant silhouette at the other end of the tunnel suddenly reminds us, Harper is not alone. The lone male figure suddenly begins charging at Harper – and while she is able to make it to safety on this first occasion, it is a presence which increasingly encroaches on her and our feelings of security throughout the film.
Cotson is seemingly populated by several other people – but each with a striking resemblance to Rory Kinnear (who is himself a veteran of A Ghost Story for Christmas – having appeared in The Mezzotint). The most prominent of them are Geoffrey – a horse-faced toff, who owns the stately home Harper is holidaying in – as well as a lank-haired vicar, a police officer, and a nameless, naked individual who seems to be following Harper.
Some of the individuals have an initial air of benevolence about them. But the more danger Harper finds herself in, the less accommodating, and more frightening, they become. After the naked man attempts to break into the holiday cottage, the police office arrests him – only to release him by nightfall as he didn’t believe there was anything he could charge him for. Geoffrey pledges to help secure the house after a second break-in attempt, only to utterly ignore Harper’s pleas to stay with her – recalling a moment his hateful father had called him a coward during his childhood, which has clearly led him to conclude that ‘first-rate military men’ don’t listen to women. The vicar meanwhile presents himself as someone to confide in about Harper’s recent troubles, only to immediate weaponise those painful memories against her as a sexual predator.
It is here that a lot of the more dismissive commentary around Men stopped. The surface level reading many of the film’s biggest detractors offered up was that this was a play on the tired trope that all men are the same – and they checked out. But that is itself a grotesque over-simplification of what seems to be going on here.
On one level, through his film, Garland has placed us all in an abusive relationship. Vicariously, we have felt Harper’s pain, and we have also felt the seeming liberation that severing herself from her old life brought her. Just as a manipulative ‘lover’ might use the early honeymoon phase of a relationship to subtly encourage their partner to distance themselves from anyone ‘holding them back’, the story has offered us up a beautiful glimpse of peace, away from a tumultuous world, only to immediately turn that against us, to confuse us and torment us, knowing that there is no more refuge for us to turn to. The sinking feeling which comes with realising this state of play is sickening to anyone who knows it first-hand – and I think it renders Men the most disturbing film I have seen in a long time.
At the same time, I think there is a lot more at play with regards to Kinnear’s multi-faceted performance than the film’s detractors gave credit for. The various characters he displays are not all inherently ‘evil’ by virtue of being men – but rather they are a visual metaphor for how one particularly horrible man came to be the way he was.
In the film’s climactic sequence, the naked man returns. Only he is changed. As he has continuously been drawn to Harper, he has gradually taken on the form of the Green Man from the church, his face covered in vibrant oak leaves. The Green Man in the church appears in combination with the Sheela na gig – a carving of a female form with an exaggerated vulva, which some theories state is a pre-Christian fertility symbol – so it appears the visual nature of the naked man is harking back to early assertions that women should have a limited lot in life as healers, carers or breeders.
But Garland’s take on this then turns the assumptions of the Green Man on its head. Having pursued Harper relentlessly out of this instinct to find his modern Sheela na gig, the oak-clad man suddenly collapses to the turf – his belly distended and swollen. In a spectacularly graphic sequence, he pulls his legs apart, and proceeds to give birth through his anus – before laying back, and breathing his last.
The fruit of his labour is a rapidly ageing man – another incarnation of Kinnear’s many characters – who only stumbles ahead a few feet, before undergoing the same process – though through a different orifice. This grisly cycle recurs relentlessly, with some remarkable gore that will live long in the memory of those who can bear to look, before culminating with one final push – as the final man gives birth to Harper’s late husband.
So, to recap, we have just seen a pagan entity birth a policeman, a priest, and a member of the landed gentry, among others. Each of these is a modern figure of patriarchal authority, born into one set of privileges due to their gender – but each also born in agony and deformity due to the ideological violence with preserves that system; each fucked by the actions of its forebears and re-enforcing the same cycle of misery through their own actions. Eventually, this cycle manifests the man who mentally and physically abused Harper – and may well have tried to kill her, had he been able to find a way back into her apartment.
As with virtually all of Garland’s work, this does not tie into a particularly neat conclusion. There is a sense in much of his work that he is making weird, interesting short-films that just happen to last two hours – rather than trying to make something which will sate everyone’s desire for a satisfactory narrative arc. Personally, I am fine with that – and hope that there are many, many more films to come from him.
In this case, Garland’s story seems to be nudging the men watching to consider their own actions, in the shadow of their formative experiences. We are not responsible for the way we find the world when we enter it. But we are responsible for maintaining it as it is, and the harm we inflict on others in the process. We deserve the very worst of things until we try to change ourselves accordingly. On the cusp of an uncertain new year, it’s well worth reflecting on that.