‘Men’ movie review: Jessie Buckley stars in Alex Garland’s densely symbolic horror film
As problematic as it’s provocative, the movie, from writer-director Alex Garland (“Ex Machina”), begins with a lady rising from the aftermath of a private tragedy. Harper (Jessie Buckley) has simply misplaced her husband (Paapa Essiedu) in a grisly fall. It’s an ambiguous “did he leap or was he metaphorically pushed” situation that’s alluded to in a dreamy, slow-motion reminiscence early within the movie (later performed out with higher context, by way of extra flashbacks that includes loud arguments and, at one level, spousal assault).
As a part of her therapeutic course of, Harper has rented a distant, 500-year-old cottage from a member of the country gentry in the course of nowhere: Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear), who reveals her across the well-appointed retreat with a mixture of overly earnest solicitousness and awkward makes an attempt at cornball humor. Harper has barely swallowed a chew of an apple from the backyard’s tree earlier than he’s chiding her — facetiously — about “forbidden fruit.”
The reference to the biblical ebook of Genesis, and Eve’s purported sin, is barely the primary of many cultural associations with the cycle of creation, beginning and loss of life — some direct, some oblique — that Garland sprinkles all through the densely symbolic nightmare that follows. Its contours solely start to come back into focus within the first act: in a largely dialogue-free passage, as Harper strolls about this verdant Eden, encountering not simply the carcasses of lifeless animals however a creepy bare stalker within the woods, and on her very first day there, at that.
Kinnear performs the stalker, too, together with the native vicar, a village policeman, the tavern keeper, his buyer and a disturbingly aggressive 9-year-old-boy, utilizing a wide range of pretend enamel, wigs, a beard, CGI and varied accents. It’s an performing tour de power, in addition to a robust casting determination that faucets into some primal concept of fungible masculinity that harnesses — whereas going effectively past — the all-men-are-pigs trope.
Quickly, Harper is operating for her life, as each manifestation of the movie’s title appears bent on tormenting her, bodily or psychologically.
Clearly, all will not be effectively on this paradise, and it solely will get worse. Every thing culminates in a home-invasion climax that’s equal elements slasher flick, David Lynch-ian hallucination and literary seminar. The vicar at one level actually quotes from Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” a poem about violation and impregnation by the Greek god Zeus, whereas within the guise of a hen. Different recurring imagery features a stone carving of the Sheela-Na-Gig, an historic fertility image that includes exaggerated feminine genitalia, and the Inexperienced Man, a pagan image of regeneration during which sprigs of vegetation sprout from human flesh.
However probably the most fruitful facet of the movie could also be its themes, which unbraid and retwist the threads and conventions of the damsel-in-distress narrative at the same time as they superficially observe them. (After all the home has a spotty cellphone connection.)
It’s laborious to know what to make of “Males,” and even whether or not that ambiguity is the movie’s energy or its weak spot. One factor is bound: The film will infuriate some, whether or not followers of conventional horror or these anticipating one thing extra straightforwardly feminist from Buckley, an Oscar nominee for “The Misplaced Daughter,” whom Garland has described as a completely collaborative companion — together with the shape-shifting Kinnear — in his artistic course of. However its seeming transgressions are as thrilling as they’re difficult.
Given its provenance, there’s little purpose to think about “Males” as something apart from a cultural critique of patriarchy. Nevertheless it’s not an overt or simple one. It’s laborious to look at, sure. Nevertheless it’s additionally laborious to dismiss, or to neglect. I noticed “Males” two weeks in the past, and I nonetheless really feel haunted by it.
R. At space theaters. Incorporates disturbing and violent content material, graphic nudity, grisly pictures and coarse language. 100 minutes.
