Alex Garland’s recent release of Men (2022) stands on contesting ground as the least critically received film in the writer-director and novelist’s acclaimed oeuvre of work. While Garland has dealt with horror/thriller genres and themes of challenging gender politics before, many critics were less favoring of this project, and have since aimed criticism at the narrative and its pretentious themes. Nevertheless, I find there to be interesting material in Men that deserves more attention. The film conspicuously cites other (better) psychological horror films and presents the abject masculine figure in incisive ways that are perhaps more stimulating conceptually than they are corporeal. Men treads some familiar discourse about scrutinizing masculinity within the horror genre. But it also teases at something more pervasive, even universal, about the dangers of the masculine figure. It is worth acknowledging that Garland’s characters and themes are restricted to a heteronormative and cisgendered viewpoint. This rather narrow perspective calls for more complex considerations of the monstrous masculine figure, as the film’s contentions are ideologically limited by this gendered point of view. Nevertheless, Men viciously contends the grotesque masculine form against the resistant and traumatized feminine figure in a manner that makes broad, provocative claims about the presence of men. In this, the film’s thesis is quite horrific.
One common critical agreement concerns praise for the two main actors Jesse Buckley and Rory Kinnear — one will find that most critics place performance quality above most else when evaluating films, strangely enough. But Buckley’s Harper Marlowe is our main point of interest, as the audience allies with her unnerving encounters with the various manifestations of men played by Kinnear: the holiday cottage host Geoffrey; the vicar; the bartender; pub patrons; the constable; the naked (Green) man; and even a preadolescent child Samuel. In the narrative, Harper has set off on a solo holiday in the English village of Cotson. Harper has recently been traumatized by the (apparent) suicide of her abusive husband, which is scattered across the main plot in a series of revealing, orange-hued flashbacks. There is some generic narrative familiarity here with Harper attempting to assuage a traumatic experience by escaping to a rural locale, only to find that her traumas have manifested in physically ambiguous phenomena. It is worth considering how this narrative design plays out similarly in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), and how Kinnear’s omnipresence as every man in the narrative, aside from the deceased husband James (Paapa Essiedu), is a bit brazen in its thematic precepts. However, Kinnear’s men in Men are more than just manifestations of a gendered critique, or ideologically grotesque in their volatile masculinity. They also represent a broader, more sinister contention that the film seems to offer. It’s not just that men are an oppressive, patrilineal force to be reckoned with. They are, within this narrative, pervasive and omnipresent. They are an unyielding universal force ingrained within nature. One very subtle instance in the latter portion of the story seems to indicate this further.
As Harper spends the majority of Men in the country village, she finds herself surrounded by a company of men who all retain the same visage — whether Harper recognizes this is rather curious, and Garland centralizes this ambiguity. But if we view her uncertain encounters and perception of these figures as dubious in their meaning, then this further typifies her character’s relationship with the abject. These men all behave toward Harper in oppressive manners which are passive-aggressive at first and grow to be more physically threatening. Geoffrey is putatively well-meaning but uneasy, the policeman is dismissive of her anxieties, the vicar gaslights Harper by questioning her responsibility in James’s death, and the little boy Samuel rebukes her when she resists his attention, and the naked man stalks her endlessly. In the end, this company launches a full-on attack on Harper, and she must defend herself by resisting them physically and mentally. As Julia Kristeva details in her instrumental book “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection” (1980), much of this discourse relates to a conceptual vetting of the ‘I/Other.’ Kristeva’s treatise examines the disintegration of meaning and a person’s loss of understanding between themselves and the Other, as a repellent, unrelatable object of interest. In this case, men entirely symbolize the Other and their very gender becomes a site of abject intrigue and scrutiny. Garland’s pointed critique of patrilineal gender disparities in Men informs the ideologically abject, while also manifesting in abject corporeal forces in the film’s closing moments.
Men’s narrative is reasonably straightforward as it details Harper’s successive encounters with the Cotson men. She is eventually stalked by the naked man who follows her from the woods and into her garden. This inciting incident sets off a chain of events where she comes to realize that all the men in the village seem to be conspiring against her, and their invasion of her space becomes ever more threatening as the plot progresses. Beyond their thematic terror, the men become more generically monstrous as the film reaches the final act. This is especially apparent when Harper slices Kinnear’s arm as it reaches through the post slot of the cottage door. During the home invasion sequences of the film’s climax, she contends with the various Kinnear men all of whom bear the same piercing injury (which itself resembles an abject wound Harper sees on James at his death). While these men have thus far been abject figures in their behavior, now they further exemplify abjection through modes of body horror. Their grotesque corporeality manifests literally through the bifurcated arm and in the intense sequence where the men regurgitate one another out of what appears to be a vaginal aperture atop their heads. This physical aberration is emblematic of the body horror subgenre and has a historical presence spearheaded by filmmakers like David Cronenberg and David Lynch. A more apparent citation appears to be the rich and more compelling horror film Possession (1981) by Andrzej Żulawski. Possession deals with gender politics in more creatively incisive and ambiguous ways than Men does, however, both films feature horrific configurations of male characters, and this shares a similar thesis posturing the masculine as innately abject. In Possession the monster embodies a tentacled creature that morphs into a man, whereas Men features the self-mutilated naked man, as well as Kinnear’s monstrous mutations through their rebirth. While Antichrist also evidences features of body horror, it is more concerned with exploring the nature of fear, grief, and melancholy than it is overtly interrogating gender conflicts, such as misogyny. In contrast to Men and Possession, Antichrist trades a monster figure for threatening animals, emblematic of folk horror, and acts of extreme violence between a grieving couple.
Men’s relation to Antichrist is also apparent in two very similar sequences between the two films. Both stories detail a person fleeing to the false safety of rural spaces, following a traumatic death. For Harper, she sees her husband slip from the upstairs balcony and fall to his death — impaled on the metal fencing below. Similarly, Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character, aptly named She, experiences the death of her child at the beginning of Antichrist, as he falls to his death from an open windowsill. Garland’s use of slow-motion cinematography in filming James’s death shows strong visual parallels with the hyper-slow motion falling sequence in Antichrist (shot at a drastic 1,000 frames per second). Moreover, both films were shot on the Phantom 4K camera, evidencing their technical similarities. Some may view this as derivative, but I find that Garland’s transparent citation of von Trier’s film is worthwhile, not as an appropriative gesture, but as an acknowledgment of a larger discourse in horror films that investigates the horrific presence of masculinity.
Garland’s references further include Possession, as both films deal in incensed ideological critiques of toxic masculinity and show grotesque monstrous-masculine figures as a climatic force to be challenged. In Possession, Isabelle Adjani’s Anna is seen having sex with a tentacled monster that later morphs into a doppelgänger of her husband Mark (Sam Neill). Her copulation with the monster is an exacting gesture of resistance toward the original Mark. Furthermore, the doppelgänger’s frightening arrival at Helen’s flat (Adjani’s double) during the film’s climax shows a rebirthing of the masculine presence, as Garland showcases quite literally in the climax of Men. The self-reflexive rebirthing section in Men postures that the horrifying male presence in the film doesn’t need sexual feminine copulation to procreate or exist. It nefariously persists of its own accord. During this portion of the film, the naked man reappears at the cottage, marked up to resemble the folkloric Green man, a symbol of rebirth. From this masculine configuration, he births most versions of the Cotson men from an enlarged opening atop his head. After a few Kinnear men erupt from their cranial apparatuses, this abject monster manifests her literal spousal trauma by birthing the late James as its final mutation. This is the last man she must face in the film. The message behind these grotesque aberrations suddenly becomes very pointed, as Harper must finally deal with the monstrous trauma that brought her to the village. Both Antichrist and Possession are more oblique in their narratives and more aesthetically provocative in their formalism and themes than Men. However, these strong filmic texts provide currents of inspiration for Garland to explore the abject masculine figure in his directorial efforts. Critical interest in Antichrist has also recognized thematic parallels between von Trier and Żuławski, further stimulating critical conversations between the three films.
The notorious rebirthing sequence in the film’s climax helps to solidify our audience association and sympathy with Harper, as she experiences this overtly grotesque experience with the masculine other, exemplified in Kinnear’s self-birthing of his Coston iterations. The body horror characteristics in this sequence exemplify the corporeal as an abject presence. Kinnear’s extreme body transmutations challenge feminine corporeality as a site of natural birth and nurture. And thus, Kinnear signifies the physically abject in this breakdown of meaning and threat of distinction for Harper. As Kinnear expels these versions of himself, grown, and snarling from birth, Garland is positioning the abject, masculine figure as something not only nefarious or pervasive but something more ideologically regurgitative: man is a parthenogenetic force, resisting female prowess by constantly positioning its gender in contrast with the feminine. This notion also comes across in a very confronting manner during an earlier scene, where Harper is car-jacked by Geoffrey after running him over and is subsequently abandoned by a roadside. While most would acknowledge the horrific rebirthing sequence as the pinnacle of abjection in Men, I find this instance to be the most thought-provoking and richly thematic scene of the entire film. Harper, alone at night on a country lane, looks at the cosmos in a moment of reprieve. At this moment she catches her breath and looks up to see the beauty of cosmic nature. However, instead of evidencing a resistance to masculinity through the assuring presence of (feminine) nature, the myriad of stars seems to imply the ubiquity of phenomena that is tethered to the masculine presence. This notion is further positioned by Geoffrey’s speeding return in Harper’s car as he attempts to run her over. His disruptive presence highlights the unyielding and threatening force of men. Kinnear’s exponential iterations of such men are paralleled by the dominating presence of stars. Here, the ideological notion of man’s omnipresence comes across in the disruptive return of Geoffrey and the images of the vast starscape as a visual pretext of false comfort.
As with Possession and Antichrist, Men’s monstrous creatures exist in unsteady relations to the diegesis. That is, when characters contend with monstrous figures in these films, it is often unclear if their presence is literal within the story worlds, or if they exist in a more allegorical sense. But Men challenges this ambiguity during the film’s denouement. Once Kinnear’s parthenogenetic metamorphosis finally ends in James’s birth and desperate appeal to Harper, an elliptic transition cuts to an outside perspective of Riley (Gayle Rankin) arriving to check on her friend the following morning. Riley’s presence is crucial for understanding the film’s gendered discourse, as she is the only feminine presence in the film, aside from Harper and her brief encounter with a sympathetic policewoman Frieda (Sarah Twomey). Her cheeky demeanor and affirming friendship with Harper stands in direct contrast with the other characters in Men. Riley’s role in the film also verifies Harper’s experience through a sense of realism through their video chats and in her final arrival to the holiday home. When she comes to Cotson in search of her friend, the pregnant Riley finds Harper’s wrecked car out front, as well as a trail of blood in the front doorway. While the plot of the film does hold a strong figurative presence, Riley’s experience of this evidence provides fewer doubts as to the actuality of Harper’s travails. Unlike the other psychological horror films in question, Men offers a distinguishable reality to the fold, despite some critical response that says otherwise. In the final moments of the film, when Riley does find Harper sitting alone on the garden steps, Harper has an odd countenance of reprieve. She is also (finally) free from male presence. Has she reconciled her trauma, or has she merely accepted the worst of her situation? In any case, her pale pink, flesh-colored clothes (as she wears throughout the film) suggest some form of rebirth in herself. Which is itself a gentle contrast to the men expelling one another from their abject corpus. Riley’s revealed pregnancy also grounds feminine-coded birth as a positive corporeal embodiment, against the invasive masculine birth evidenced in the previous sequence.
Harper’s flight to a rural cottage, only to face realized horrors of past trauma, imply features recognizable to the folk horror subgenre. And while this narrative approach isn’t wholly unique, Garland’s execution is lurid, pointed, and provocative enough to sustain a palpable interest in this project. His citations of Żuławski and von Trier invoke more ideologically complex and discursive horror films and provide a thread to other projects of elevated content. In short, Men is derivative of other horror films but generates enough ideological discourse to sustain its merit. Garland engages here with familiar criticisms of dangerous masculinity in the horror genre, while further offering subtle indications of masculine pervasiveness in a universal sense. One glaring feature of the film is the fact that the only Afro-British actor in Men plays James, the source of Harper’s masculine trauma. While I doubt that this racial disparity is wholly intentional, it does stand out in a manner that either signals colorblind casting, or is a decision that consciously lacks socio-political acknowledgement of minority representation in an effort to remain ‘universal’ in its gendered criticisms. In any case, this aspect of Men’s casting is more noticeable than the conceit of Kinnear’s multitude of men; and this treads uneasy grounds, in terms of its larger social critiques. Men does not achieve the esteemed quality of its citations and some critics have evaluated the film’s metaphors as lofty and uninspired. Others have expressed that the film’s intriguing material is alluring but ultimately beyond reach and would benefit from sharper focus. Despite these valid critiques, Garland does craft a concentrated and decent horror film that provokes deeper, rhetorical reflections on the nature of the abject masculine. The plot may hold some hackneyed pretense as a broad indictment of the gender, but Men’s message is apparent: Men are all alike, insidious, fake, and unrelenting. While this enduring thought deserves more complex consideration (such as the abject feminine or Barbara Creed’s monstrous feminine as contrasting forces more evident in Antichrist and Possession) it prompts a gendered discourse that is truly horrific. How must the feminine negotiate their encounters with the masculine, as an oppressive omnipresence?
