MEN – Jessie Buckley is plagued by a seemingly endless supply of Rory Kinnear(s) in Alex Garland’s folk horror / social commentary / multi-Kinnear gimmick spectacular, ‘Men’. “A complete game changer” screams the blurb on the case – well, no, but I can imagine many finding it at least very striking (a few are bound to walk away nonplussed or irritated). Kinnear-ism aside, I think what it says or doesn’t say about gender is less interesting than Garland’s summoning of something vague and mythic behind placid English greenery. It seems inevitable that it should tug on memories of radiophonically soundtracked seventies UK horror, despite being anchored in the present; that approach is nothing new, but the atmosphere of ‘Men’ is pretty impeccable, a kind of sustained, low-key unreality not unlike that of a mundane dream steadily derailing, then erupting. Its use of mainstays is provocatively blunt. Shady back roads, country pile, the villagers are backwards or hostile… it would be impossible for rural horror not to happen, but WHAT happens is up for grabs. Its theme of a primal, ugly masculinity might be open to various interpretations, but nothing is really laboured (apart from all that monstrous birthing at the end). The old stand-bys of “is it real / supernatural / all in the character’s head” don’t seem all that relevant; ‘Men’, against the grain of its trad folk horror trappings, works more as a drifting weave of allusions. Its pagan echoes have a touch of the Machen-esque, but the stark weirdness of that naked guy somehow reminded me more of Aickman, as if the creepy dude from ‘The Same Dog’ had stepped from behind his wall… to rid us of all this Englishness, the finale brings it on with more out-there bonkers body horror than Lynch dreaming Cronenberg. Whether these references are in there I have no idea, but I really liked ‘Men’, a little less than ‘Annihilation’ maybe, but there’s no doubt that here is an authentic vision of weird horror.
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