For the last decade Alex Garland has been one of Hollywood’s most interesting sci-fi directors, from his deconstruction of the fascist cop story, Dredd, to the introspective apocalyptic world of Annihilation, as well as his acclaimed TV show Devs. But with his latest film, Men, he has sprinted into the brick wall where his talents end.
Men is about Harper, a woman renting an English country house to escape the world as she processes her abusive husband’s suicide. While there she runs into the various men of the village, who all have the same face and harass her in various misogynistic ways.
That’s really all there is to the plot.
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The film is, to put it mildly, thin. After a decent opening act where Harper settles in and explores the countryside, which is atmospheric, reflective, and heavily indebted to Solaris, the sexism starts coming and just doesn’t stop. But Garland doesn’t have anything to say about it.
It’s not like he can’t make a film about this subject. Ex Machina was an intelligent critique of techbro misogyny, which Garland clearly understands as he explored its toxicity and danger in both overt and subtler forms. But Ex Machina was told from a man’s perspective and Garland just doesn’t seem to understand women. In his directed films they’re almost always somewhat distant and unknowable figures, and what defines them is how men view them. In Ex Machina this made sense as it was the protagonist’s perspective, but even in Annihilation, generally a very good film, there’s this strange piece missing from its characterisation where every character is defined solely by non-gendered traits. If they were all male it would be the same movie.
Men completely falls apart because of this. Garland has no clue what being a woman in a sexist society is like, and so like other male auteurs making failed anti-sexism movies, like Edgar Wright and Jay Roach, he makes every interaction between his heroine and a man as aggressively blunt as possible. Every one in the film calls Harper a “bitch” or stalks her or tells her she caused her husband’s death, and it misses the real horror of reality.
The true horror of sexism is not in dramatic, individual incidents but the constant, grinding pressure from everything around you to denigrate you and force you into the unnatural shape society wants you to be, to fit the need it has of you in maintaining itself.
Garland understands none of this.
The closest he gets is in brief flashbacks to Harper’s husband abusing her, where he’s aware domestic abuse is how abusers bolster their self-esteem, by moulding their victims into props to use to maintain it, but this is all we see of their relationship so we never understand what else it consisted of. The village men meanwhile abuse Harper seemingly because that’s just what men do.
Men’s ultimate theme is that all male misogyny derives from the same patriarchal culture, a theme both thuddingly obvious and which does not need explaining to anyone who would not refuse to believe it. Rory Kinnear playing every man in the village, including a smooth-faced CGI child, makes this blatantly obvious by the 30 minute mark, but the film keeps reiterating it, culminating in a weightless CGI body horror climax whose “shocking” conclusion is that the film’s message is what it’s been telling us for the last hundred minutes.
Men feels like the work of someone who’s run out of ideas, has a vague knowledge of what he wants to say but lacks the creative impulse to find ways to say it, and may not even know if it has subtleties at all. Limp and shallow, it has no value either as something to relate to or be enlightened by, as while this vicar preaches to his choir he slurs his words and can’t croak out a message more complex than “Jesus is Lord.
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