A Spoiled Garden in Alex Garland’s Men
Once more we find ourselves watching a woman trapped, wondering what these watchers will do to her. In Alex Garland’s refracted worlds, a change in setting—a glass house or a walled garden—does little to change the outcome. We can be certain that these watchers want to abuse and exploit, even if it requires collapsing their own worlds in the process.
Garland’s latest, Men, walls in Jessie Buckley’s Harper, a woman reckoning with the recent death of her husband, who fell from their apartment building shortly after an argument. Whether it was an accident or suicide is an open question. Whether Harper should blame herself is a question she wants closed. Unfortunately, the men living in the typically quaint English village she recuperates in keep prying it back open.
The most intriguing aspect of Men eventually comes to represent its fatal flaw: each of the men of the village are portrayed by Rory Kinnear, in a way that purposefully tips it into the uncanny. The point is made clear—when it comes to violence toward women, all men are the same. There are many nods to the loss of paradise and forbidden fruit, but the film seems more focused on the idea that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Violent men beget abusive men create cruel men give birth to manipulative men enable violent men. And so it continues.
It’s certainly a valid critique of toxic masculinity and the structures that maintain it by shifting blame, dismissing suspicions, and playing up women’s frailty. The evils of abuse go beyond the direct agents of violence; the systems that insulate and nourish it are rotten to the core. At one point Harper’s bumbling host, Geoffrey, half-jokes that he must attempt to save her from danger: “Damsel in distress. I’m just a fellow.” Even in its most insipid form, this idea of manhood takes something from Harper’s power. But in the end it’s not a new critique, even among Garland’s films, and he fails to bring new insights to the conversation.
What Garland does bring is visual craft. Much like with Annihilation (a film far richer with mystery and innovation), there’s a bit of Tarkovsky in Men’s DNA—a fascination with puddled reflections, wind powerfully sweeping through open fields. The cinematography captures the sensuality of this English purgatory’s verdant landscapes, whose green promise of life and healing is deceitful. The sound design is equally sharp, as unsettling echoes ring across scenes while a variety of unfitting songs form a soundtrack that keeps the audience on their heels.
But the tone and imagery alike atrophy in the last third, as Men comes to its inevitably grisly climax. Garland, who previously created shocking moments pierced with terror and wonder, somehow all at once, here fails to be inventive or incisive. There’s a lot of blood, but little heart.
Here, where Men should become its most dynamic and haunting, it instead becomes stilted, somehow both more obvious and more bizarre than it should be. This is the final weakness of the film: It chooses a good battle, but it doesn’t have any new weapons to fight with. As Garland ramps toward the dark finale, the shocks become merely grotesque, never provocative.
