The Scare Salon

Director Alex Garland was back on my mind recently as I went to the theater to see his latest film Civil War (which we discussed at length here). I remembered how much I had loved his previous films Ex Machina (2014) and Annihilation (2018), not to mention the fact that he had written the screenplay for one of my favorite Danny Boyle films, 28 Days Later (2002).

As I was ruminating on this, I recalled seeing a trailer back in 2022 for his film Men while I was in the theater seeing another horror movie. At the time, Men looked intriguing and strange and therefore right up my alley, so I made a mental note to check it out. But then I admit I forgot about it, and I guess when it was released I didn’t notice much stir in the horror community, so it sorta flitted off to the dusty back corners of my brain.

Recently, though, I began to see people discussing Men again in light of Civil War‘s release, and it seemed that the consensus was that Men hadn’t been very good, at least according to many random opinions I read. I noticed that it was streaming on Max, though, and I was in the mood for it one weekend, so I decided to give it a shot, especially after I saw a comment on a horror forum that it was one of the weirdest movies the commenter had ever seen. That’s always a solid recommendation in my book!

Men was released by A24 and is described as a folk horror film, a classification I have no argument with whatsoever. It’s one of those ambiguous films full of symbolism that could be read in many different ways, so if you like a straightforward story with everything spelled out for you, you likely will not dig Men too much. Even though it’s eerie and relatively easy to follow, the ending goes full-on bonkers body horror, and I suspect some people will have a “WTF did I just watch” reaction if they’re not on the metaphorical wavelength the movie seems to be going for. I liked it quite a lot, more than I thought I would actually, but it’s really not for everyone, so I hesitate to recommend it to just any random fan whose preferences I’m not familiar with. Take from that what you will.

In a fantastic sequence at the beginning of the film, we’re introduced to our main character, Harper Marlowe (played by Jessie Buckley, who I recognized from Charlie Kaufman’s 2020 film adaptation of Iain Reid’s 2016 novel I’m Thinking of Ending Things). She stares out the window of her high-rise apartment with blood trickling down from her nose. Silently, a man falls in slow motion past the window, staring in at her as he plummets to his death. This masterful set-up will be elaborated upon later, as we discover who the falling man was and the situation that led up to this incident.

We then cut to Harper arriving at a country house in the village of Cotson, in Herefordshire, England, which she has rented for two weeks. We discern from flashbacks and conversations that she has been recently widowed and has come here for some time alone in order to process her grief away from the home and the city where her husband died.

Showing her around the gorgeous old place is Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear), the owner of the property and the very epitome of affable, slightly eccentric English country folk. He’s slightly awkward and goofy, and sometimes lingers or stares too long, but he doesn’t seem particularly threatening, and after the tour, he leaves Harper to her own devices.

At first, everything is idyllic; the house and gardens are gorgeous, and everything is peaceful and serene, other than Harper’s frequent and intrusive memories of her husband’s death. It turns out that the man falling past the window at the beginning of the film was, obviously, her former spouse James (Paapa Essiedu), and later on in the story, we see a full flashback in which Harper is calmly telling James that she is divorcing him. James flips the fuck out, threatens to kill himself if she leaves him, and ends up hitting her in the face (hence the bloody nose). A furious Harper locks him out of the apartment, at which point he forces his way into the apartment upstairs and attempts to climb down to his own flat via the balcony, but either slips or allows himself to fall to his grisly death below.

Harper attempts to put the past behind her and enjoy her time away, often communicating over FaceTime with her best friend Riley (Gayle Rankin). The day after getting to the house, she decides to take a walk through the nearby woods, delighted by the bucolic setting. She comes across an old railway tunnel and spends some time in there listening to echoes of her own voice, but then she sees a shadowed figure at the other end of the tunnel that comes running toward her. Understandably, she flees the area.

After she thinks she’s escaped danger, she’s walking through an open field when she sees a disturbingly naked man standing in front of what looks like an abandoned house, staring intently at her. This naked man appears in her garden later on and attempts to get in the house; Harper calls the cops and the man is hauled away, though released later that evening since he didn’t really do anything “serious.”

As the tale unfolds, Harper meets more of the men in this village (who are all played by Rory Kinnear). One is a schoolboy who calls her a stupid bitch because she won’t play hide and seek with him, one is a creepy vicar who seems understanding at first but then essentially blames her for her husband’s death after she opens up to him, a couple are just regular working blokes in a pub, one is a bartender, and one is a police officer.

I’ll also note that the small church the vicar presides over has a Green Man and a sheela-na-gig carved into the pulpit, an unexplained but significant detail.

From this point forward, the narrative grows ever more nebulous, as Harper becomes increasingly threatened by these different iterations of Rory Kinnear, some of whom appear on her front lawn or outside her door and then just as quickly disappear. She also starts having trouble getting hold of Riley over her phone, with the FaceTime app sometimes glitching out into barely-perceived disturbing imagery/faces while she’s trying to tell Riley where she is so Riley can help her.

As I mentioned, things get metaphorical and more folk-horror-focused in the third act, and the incidents become more dreamlike and also way more disgusting and visceral. Yes, this is largely a psychological horror, but it gets a bit gnarly toward the end, so squeamish people take heed.

Though I won’t spoil the ending, I will say that the movie leaves it mostly open to interpretation as to how much of what we’re seeing is “real,” and how much of it is Harper’s perception of the situation filtered through her trauma regarding the death of her husband.

The film does have something of a subtext concerning the way the different men all blame Harper for their own feelings and actions toward her, and thus could be read in a feminist light, portraying a sort of general (and generational) misogyny. I personally didn’t find this theme heavy-handed at all, as everything said by the different men in the film has been said to me or to other women I know at some point in our lives, so it didn’t come off as unrealistic or trying to get a specific point across.

That said, I found this “message,” if you want to call it that, secondary to the more creepy, nightmarish aspect of the story that centered around how Harper’s perception of the world was filtered through her experiences with her emotionally manipulative and abusive husband, whose manner of death seemed particularly calculated to burden Harper with horrible guilt for the rest of her life, even though intellectually she knew it was not her fault. She was, in a sense, seeing all the other men in the film, whether they existed in reality or not, through this fractured lens.

The movie’s cinematography is beautiful, and the acting performances are fantastic across the board. Jessie Buckley is outstanding as Harper, but Rory Kinnear absolutely crushes it in multiple roles, coming across as completely different and yet terrifyingly similar in each version or archetype he portrays.

Though it has many differences, this film reminded me in some ways of Darren Aronofsky’s mother! (which I reviewed here), so if you liked that, then you might enjoy Men as well. It seems to have gotten decent critical reviews at the time of its release, but audience reactions were and are very mixed, so it’s definitely not for all tastes. I enjoyed it a great deal and thought about it a lot after I watched it, and it definitely had some unsettling imagery that stuck with me. If you’ve seen it, I’d be curious to know your opinion on its meaning; I have my own theories, but I’m open to different interpretations.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.