Men (2022) re-review

I think I’m starting to love Men! When I watched this at first I didn’t really think much of it. “Not terrible, pretty well shot, but kinda felt like it was just weird to be weird.” But it stuck with me, and I’ve had an urge to rewatch it for a few weeks now.

A lot of comments on Instagram and film Twitter were saying that this movie was just “men bad” and nothing else, and I definitely think that that shaped my initial impressions of the movie, making me ignore or downplay the aspects of the movie that worked phenomenally when I watched it.

But ignoring whether or not Alex Garland has much to say in Men, (which upon rewatching it I do believe he does) I forgot how genuinely engaging and well-paced of a movie this is, metaphors and interpretation aside. It’s a great fantasy-horror movie. The pacing is relentless; at no point was I sitting there watching the movie bored or waiting for something to happen. As a spooky horror movie, ignoring interpretations and metaphor, Men is the most memorable and relentlessly unique horror movie since The Lighthouse. Like The Lighthouse, Men is very interpretable, and it is very obvious that it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

Like Ex Machina and Annihilation, Men looks incredible, maybe his best looking movie so far. The way green and other natural colors are used is fantastic, aiding the fantastical, otherworldly but somehow still folklore tone of the film. It's the type of movie that feels completely non-literal, as if you are watching an absurd visualization of a conflict going on in a possibly unseen protagonists head, similar to David Lynch's Lost Highway or Eraserhead, Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, or Denis Villenueve's Enemy. The use of color here is reminiscent of those films as well, keeping in tone with the mystical, dreamlike/nightmarish, surreal feelings they exude; the black and white in The Lighthouse or Eraserhead, the beige smokiness of Naked Lunch or the yellowness of Enemy.

Saying that Men has nothing to say but “men are bad” is a gross oversimplification of what is happening here. A more apt summary would be it’s asking the question “are men okay?” The answer the Garland seems to have is an astounding “absolutely not.” In the scene with the Vicar, it shows how men project their guilt onto women instead of looking inward, as well as downplay what they do to women and make it seem casual. Not so subtly, the fact that each man has the same face shows how the patriarchal norms and expectations have infected men of all ages and occupations, whether they know it or not. They ignore gaping, gory wounds in order to keep their masculinity. And most importantly, Men is about how patriarchal systems and behavior destroys men and rebirths new ones just to destroy them as well, constantly dying and being reborn upon the corpses of generations who came before it, depicted in the most satisfying and gory way imaginable in the films final moments.

Men are only correct once in the movie, and it is one of the first things spoken by the man played by Rory Kinnear. The first thing Harper does when she gets to the country home is eat an apple from the tree, an obvious yet misleading allusion to the Garden of Eden. Right away, the film makes sure to tell us that Harper eating the apple is no big deal, signifying that the upcoming horrors, as well as past horrors, are not her fault. The film takes the opposite approach that many of its detractors seem to think it does. The movie never blames Harper or treats her like an “original sin of Eve” archetype. Her guilt isn’t on her, it’s on men.