Men
Alex Garland’s third directorial outing is a visually seductive, superficial and barmy thing.
Country strife: Jessie Buckley
Men: you can’t live with them, you can’t live without them. In the case of Harper Marlowe (Jessie Buckley), she’d best avoid the sex altogether. Men, the third directorial outing from the novelist and scenarist Alex Garland, is not an easy film to review. Its power rests in its ability to surprise, and the opening minutes alone are riveting. It is raining, a net curtain is blowing in the breeze, the Shard on the Thames is briefly glimpsed. Harper Marlowe is staring out of the window. Her nose is bleeding and an amber light bathes the screen, suggesting imminent dusk. And then a man plunges past the window, caught for a split second in Harper’s line of vision. Well, that’s quite an opening. What follows, a folk-Gothic mystery with more than a touch of the allegory about it, is gripping stuff. After all, this is the man (Alex Garland) who directed Ex Machina and wrote 28 Days Later and Sunshine for Danny Boyle. We are obviously in accomplished hands.
What follows is bewitching. Harper, recovering from the shocking events of the prologue, drives from London and into deepest Cotswold country. The rolling hills, supernaturally lush greenery and picture-perfect houses waft over her as an emotional balm: just what she needs. And when she pulls up at her destination, in front of an Elizabethan manor house, she would appear to be in a bucolic nirvana. She is renting the “dream country house” for two weeks to find herself, to collect her emotions. But as soon as the front door opens to reveal the owner, a buck-toothed eccentric played by Rory Kinnear with a plum in his cheek, the film stops in its tracks. Kinnear’s Barbour-garbed Geoffrey has been ripped straight out of Little Britain. As Harper tells her bestie Riley (Gayle Rankin) on the phone, Geoffrey is a very specific ‘country’ type. And there are types all over the place, broad representations of misogynistic pillars of the community.
On the one hand, Garland steps mercifully clear of potential clichés, but muddies the waters of logic with demented abandon. For a writer, he has a great eye, but then stabs a dagger in it. Jessie Buckley, as to be expected, brings considerable gravitas to her role, but appears increasingly nonplussed, like Glenda Jackson in an episode of The Morecambe and Wise Show. What we are meant to make of it depends on our tolerance for the absurd and the ridiculous and what might have been Don’t Look Now leapfrogs over Repulsion into David Cronenberg territory. The question is whether or not Harper is going mad, her grief manifesting itself into a nightmarish scenario worthy of Hieronymus Bosch or Francis Bacon. And so intrigue turns to bewilderment and on to outright irritation. Exquisitely wrapped, once opened, the film reveals more exquisite wrapping.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Jessie Buckley, Rory Kinnear, Paapa Essiedu, Gayle Rankin, Sarah Twomey, Zak Rothera-Oxley, Sonoya Mizuno.
Dir Alex Garland, Pro Andrew Macdonald and Allon Reich, Screenplay Alex Garland, Ph Rob Hardy, Pro Des Mark Digby, Ed Jake Roberts, Music Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow, Costumes Lisa Duncan, Sound Glenn Freemantle.
DNA Films-Entertainment Film Distributors.
100 mins. UK. 2022. US Rel: 20 May 2022. UK Rel: 1 June 2022. Cert. 15.
