| Director(s) | Alex Garland |
| Principal Cast | Jessie Buckley as Harper Rory Kinnear as Geoffrey Paapa Essiedu as James Gayle Rankin as Riley |
| Release Date | 2022 |
| Language(s) | English |
| Running Time | 100 minutes |
| Report Card | Click to go to Review TLDR/Summary |
NOTE: This is a new release and the review is based off a theatre viewing. This means the review won’t feature common elements like visual analysis, extended theme analysis, or long-form discussions of the cinematic techniques being used. Once I am able to get a copy of the movie to watch, pause, analyze, and get stills from the review will be updated to match the current site’s standard.
A young woman, Harper (Jessie Buckley) comes to an English countryside where she rents a cottage to deal with trauma stemming from her husband’s (Paapa Essiedu) unexpected passing. To get her mind off the situation, she goes on a stroll through the grounds and ends up in a forest ripe with greens all around. She finds herself at the entrance of a tunnel, a dark passage to an unknown location; the hole captivates her and she enters it.
Her voice echoes in the cave, reverberating against itself in cycles. She sings a variety of different tunes, some with only a few notes, against one another, transforming the collective soundscape into an evocative ouroboros-like melody wherein each discrete set of notes fades into the next before eventually returning. But Harper’s song of echoes comes to an end as a silhouetted man appears at the other side of the tunnel. The man breaks the moment’s serenity and gives chase to Harper all the way back to her cottage.
This scene defines and crystallizes the logic of Men, a work in which narrative, visual, and auditory patterns are interwoven against and within one another, generating a complex schema of meaning contingent on how the viewer orients themselves towards the cinematic experience. This act of interpretation places the viewer squarely on Harper’s side; as she navigates a matrix of men, each obnoxious in their own chauvinistic, irritating way, and has to deal with all manners of gaslighting from them, the viewer is forced to make sense of how different story threads suture around one another and come together to form a cohesive narrative, surreal or not.
From the moment Harper meets the residents near her abode, these interpretative decisions start to sprout up: each of the men she meets sports a similar face – an intentional decision as they’re all played by Rory Kinnear. Yet this similarity in appearance is never noted by Harper or any of the characters, leaving its purpose up to interpretation. The viewer gets to determine whether or not the homogeneity is due to Harper’s subjective view of all men being the same or the film’s themes suggesting that the men are so similar that their physical appearances should reflect one another or something else entirely. Each interpretation is suggested by the film as the echoes generated by its elliptical formal choices tie seemingly innocuous details into larger theses that bracket the film in one discrete direction versus another. These choices in perspective have such a compounding effect on the nature of the narrative that a viewer could leave justifiably thinking that the film only portrays one character death, shown in flashback, or showcases multiple character deaths sprinkled throughout the story. However, regardless of which path the viewer and Harper choose to follow, the center of that journey always terminates in man.
Thus, Harper’s journey, whatever the viewer determines it is, elliptically orders itself around the nature of a subject’s relationship to men and the social order oriented around and indexed towards their positions. Regardless of which man Harper finds herself encountering, the same cycle ensues: her attempts at individual peace are interrupted as she’s forced to give attention to the man in question, the nature of that attention being contingent on the above interpretative schema.
The dream-like quality can easily be dismissed as art-house pretension, especially as the subtext sublimates in a visceral body horror that threatens to confuse more than illuminate. But by leaving the viewer in the same fractured and entranced state as its protagonist, Men manages to provoke an empathetic engagement with the subject matter, even if the nature of that engagement differs wildly from viewer to viewer. Far from gaslighting the viewer with obtuse, opaque threads meant to elicit confusion, Men forces the viewer to take responsibility for the narrative they craft from the film itself.
REPORT CARD
| TLDR | Men is an ambitious piece of film-making that investigates the nature of gaslighting and obfuscation by making the viewer responsible for piecing together the narrative and taking charge of what it means. The unnerving, surreal imagery takes on a new life as its purpose takes on a subjective meaning, letting the horrors take firm root in the mind. Even when the thresholds for explanation wear thin, the experience generated by the emphatic connection with a protagonist going through a similar labyrinth of meaning and construction ensures the feelings of the film still wash over. |
| Rating | 10/10 |
| Grade | S |
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis.
Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
