After captivating with his first film, “Ex Machina”, writer and screenwriter Alex Garland continued with the genre with “Annihilation”. On this occasion, the British director dives into another genre and dares with terror with ‘Men’, presented at the Directors’ Fortnight at the 75th Cannes Film Festival and the opening film of the 26th Bucheon Fantastic Film Festival. A feature film that attracted attention for having brought the minimalist style of his first work closer to a proposal close to the cinema of Robert Eggers or Ari Aster.
The first thing is that its staging and its beginning attract attention. Shot during the fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the fact that the protagonist leaves the city to find peace in the tranquility of the English countryside is reminiscent of that timealthough it is not Garland’s intentions, who narrates how a widowed woman decides to get away from the maddened crowd to find peace after her husband’s suicide. Garland knows how to create atmosphere and can transform a peaceful village and forest ideal for reading or painting into a sinister setting.
But really, the thing goes no further. ‘Men’ is a parable, a disturbing fable about the oppression of men over women, how they invade their privacy to unsuspected limits and how they manage to dominate it even after death. This is mixed with a folkloric horror story, betting on a small town like ‘Midsommar’ and introducing supernatural elements typical of the area, as Banjong Pisanthanakun recently did in ‘The Medium’. If you add an attempt to raise awareness, this being a story about toxic masculinity and abuse, the combination of this could work well.
And it turns out well, at least initially, ever since Garland ends up escaping “Men”, breaking all logic, even within the codes of the dark fable. Furthermore, what could have been a supernatural response to “A Young Woman of Promise” results in a proposal that over-emphasizes the intellectual background and ends up abandoning its premise with a series of sequences that cause more disgust than fear, in the purest gore style, away from the supposed psychological terror that seemed to be the film at the beginning.
Proposal of terror that ends up losing its meaning
Garland has experience in both horror, was a screenwriter for ’28 days after ‘, as well as writing the screenplay for the dystopia’ Never leave me ‘. However, the author of “The Beach” ends up transforming his proposal into a Manichean tale, in which the male figure is not only portrayed as evil or perverse, but also his female protagonist leaves out all complexity, whose plot is constantly subjected to the traumas caused by the opposite sex. Also, unlike how Emerald Fennell portrayed female revenge and male trauma in the aforementioned film starring Carey Mulligan, Garland creates a more passive character.
Despite this, its actors give themselves body and soul. Jessie Buckley, recently nominated for an Oscar for ‘The Dark Daughter’, returns with an extreme role, with which she recounts the trauma experienced by the suicide of her character’s husband, as well as how this becomes an emotional prison in which the deceased spouse becomes a guard. beside her, there is a masterful Rory Kinnear, who faces a multiple role with which he manages to show all the horrors of the malewith a ghostly touch that manages to provoke different reactions depending on the role he plays.
Although Garland is an expert in creating indoor atmospheres, “Men” remains at half-throttle. His look at how the modern Pygmalion ends up being overtaken by his creation in “Ex Machina” worked, but his dark fable about the Green Man seems false, as if the director wanted to meet certain requirements of current arthouse cinema. author. The result is irregular and shows that, at the moment, the English author knows how to create science fiction, but that in terms of horror he has not been able to find that touch that has so characterized him. in his brief raids as a director, nor in his role as a screenwriter, being far from ’28 days later ‘. ‘Men’ causes a bittersweet feeling, as if it’s a proposition that should offer more.
Note: 5
The best: The multiple interpretations of Rory Kinnear, the oppressive atmosphere that is created at the beginning of the film.
Worse: The feeling that Garland is flying forward in its final part.
Source: E Cartelera
