CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS AND EUUUURGH
I am indebted to my sister for alerting me to an online article declaring this new British horror film to be "so disturbing" that viewers "storm out of the cinema". Granted, the "article" in question comes from no less a bastion of analytical journalism than the Daily Star and, if you can make it through their ghastly howling intellectual abyss of a website, you'll discover that the reporter has done very little more than click on a couple of Twitter hashtags and breathlessly report the findings. Like the stories about Saw III audiences requiring people from St John's Ambulance because they couldn't take the blood and gore, it sounds more like a publicity gimmick than anything else. Those tweets actually hailed from America last month and, if you follow them up a little, were more bewildered than upset. Here in Britain, nobody threw up, fainted or stormed out when I saw it on Sunday night - all six of us were still there at the end and walked away perfectly steadily.
Bewilderment, though, is absolutely the right response. Men starts out as a fairly ordinary, almost generic-looking movie in which a woman arrives in a remote village and finds herself surrounded by a variety of creepy weirdos, some openly aggressive, some unsettlingly creepy, but all representing different shades of unattractive masculinity. Following the death of her abusive soon-to-be ex-husband, Harper (Jessie Buckley) rents a country pile in a distant Gloucestershire village. The landlord is chummy but a bit too chummy. When she goes for a walk in the woods, she's stalked and followed home by a naked stranger. The vicar suggests to her that she might have actually driven her husband to his death, and a schoolboy calls her a stupid bitch to her face. Yes, men are horrible.
But halfway through Men stops being about how horrible men are and veers off into full-on gloopy gore that makes you wonder how it got away with a 15 certificate. Like Darren Aronofsky's Mother! (and even after all these years I'm still refusing to put that title in lower case), it initially seems quite rational but transforms into something far more uncomfortable, maybe symbolic, maybe allegorical, but far less interesting. There's any amount of mileage to be had from casting Rory Kinnear in all the male roles (except the late husband), as all the different aspects of sexism and misogyny. It's a theatrical device that makes for a nice statement: Men, they're all the same. (On a literal level, though, the fact that every man in the village looks like Rory Kinnear also suggests centuries of inbreeding and incest.) But merging it with ye olde legend of The Green Man (for no immediately obvious reason) and a final reel swerve into slimy body horror territory that includes not one, not two, but three scenes of Kinnear giving bloody flesh-stretching birth to himself diffuses any commentary as we're trying to work out what the hell we're watching and what the film has suddenly become, as though someone's suddenly switched over from the ITV Drama Premiere to a screening of Brian Yuzna's Society.
In fact the most shocking and horrific moment in the movie has nothing to do with surreal gore, but is a sudden explosion of domestic violence. Why? Because that kind of thing happens in the real world: in the same way that the big that's-got-to-hurt moment of Hellraiser doesn't involve resurrected corpses under the floorboards or getting ripped apart with metal hooks by evil bondage demons, but Andrew Robinson gashing his hand on a nail. Worse still, not only do Men's icky gore highlights not occur in the real world, it becomes increasingly apparent that they're not happening in the world of the film either: the fact that most of the film is either symbolic or imaginary means great chunks of it may all be taking place in her head, which leads to yet another terrible aspect of men belittling women: "oh, she's just seeing things, poor dear, she's getting hysterical."
I struggled with Men. Not as much as I did with Mother!, perhaps, but as it wandered away from any kind of comprehensible narrative and reality, I found it more and more insufferable and annoying, and I found myself losing patience with it and wondering how much longer it had to run. It's a pity: I liked Ex Machina and sort-of enjoyed Annihilation but this is by some distance the least of Alex Garland's films thus far: no matter how good the performances are (and they are good, no question) and no matter how serious the content, too much of it is lost in the "so disturbing you'll storm out" third act because when you leave the cinema that's pretty much all you remember. It's not a bad film, but it's a very bad time, and for all that's good about it it's still one of the year's major lowlights so far and impossible to recommend. Men are horrible and so is Men.
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