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eventually reaching the house and its seeming
safety. Later, she’s horriied to ind a naked man
peering in at her from the house’s enormous win-
dows. She calls the police, who arrest him. And
that, she thinks, is that.
Until she meets a country vicar who at irst
seems eager to soothe her troubled heart, only
to turn on her by asking what she might have
done to cause her husband’s suicide. And then
a schoolboy with mean little eyes who tries to
cajole her, menacingly, into a game of hide-and-
seek. Who are these terrible country people,
anyway? All the while, Harper is haunted by
memories of her dead husband (played by Paapa
Essiedu), recalling how he’d threatened to kill
himself when she’d told him, with good reason,
that she was leaving: “You’ll have to live with
your conscience.”A rotting deer, its eye socket viewed as a
maggoty cosmic swirl; a church lectern with
your standard traditional Green Man adorning
one side and a lewd, anatomically suggestive fe-
male igure carved on the other; a terrifying de-
velopment involving an ordinary, if not so subtly
symbolic, mail slot. What does it all mean? Gar-
land’s third feature as director—following the
ambitious and unsettling artiicial-intelligence
drama Ex Machina, and the less efective sci-i
parable Annihilation—is a disquieting picture
with a chilly heart, a movie that makes harsh
pronouncements about how vile men can be,
even as it occasionally sounds a note of tender-
ness for these poor, misguided creatures.
Because if Men has a point at all, it’s that
women are the stronger, more resourceful sex.
Buckley is terriic as a woman who faces her
fears outright, refusing to be cowed by male
bullishness—she’s both resolute and believably
vulnerable. Garland is careful, too, to neither fe-
tishize nor trivialize her terror. We’re on her side
every minute. When she grabs a kitchen knife in
self-defense, you’re likely to feel your own hand
closing around a handle.
And perhaps without intending to, Garland
has hit on an all too timely truth: that men seek
to control women as a response to their own
self-loathing. Even if you walk out of Men not
knowing what to think, the movie brings you
to a place where feeling overtakes thought. The
shiver that comes over you may be one of recog-
nition or melancholy or a muddle of both, as you
stand at the edge of where a movie ends, blurring
into real life. DepenDing on whom you ask, moDern men
are either sufering a crisis of masculinity or they
wield more power than ever. In his tricky psycho-
sexual horror ilm Men, writer-director Alex
Garland explores both angles, suggesting that
men don’t know who they are anymore, which
only leads them to act out in disastrous ways,
locked in a state of radical insecurity that’s cre-
ating a nightmare for women. Even if he ofers
no clear solutions to this crisis, he throws his full
weight into exploring it. Just be warned that the
path he cuts is a thorny one.
Jessie Buckley plays Harper, a young woman
who escapes to a glorious English country house
in the hopes of healing after her husband’s sui-
cide. But the place is strange from the start. The
house’s owner (Rory Kinnear), red-faced and
jolly in a passive- aggressive way, greets her at the
door and shows her around, lashing his enor-
mous choppers as he warns her about the house’s
ancient plumbing: “Ladies, do watch what you
lush.” He also makes nosy queries about her
marital status. As soon as he leaves—phew!—
Harper goes for a walk in search of solitude.
For a few minutes, she inds it, reveling in
the nearly luorescent spring green of the trees,
the patter of sudden raindrops, an echoey stone
tunnel that ampliies both her voice and her re-
lief at inally being alone. But then she sees a
man—or just the vague form of a man— running
toward her from the tunnel’s far end. She lees,
REVIEW
The horrifying truth
about Men
BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK
If Men has
a point
at all, it’s
that women
are the
stronger,
more
resourceful
sex◁ Buckley as Harper, seeking
solace, only to ind herself
hunted and hauntedA24