The Allegorical Folk Horror of Alex Garland's 'Men' Will Fascinate Some and Frustrate Others 

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• Courtesy Of Kevin Baker/A24
• MASCULINE MYSTIQUE Men torment Buckley in all sorts of guises in Garland's surreal horror film with a #MeToo subtext.

CinemaScore is a company that polls ticket buyers on opening night to find out if a given film has mass appeal. Men, the latest from writer-director Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation) received a D+ from the service. Considering that in more than 40 years only 21 movies have ever earned an F CinemaScore, that means a lot of viewers hated this one.

So, consider this fair warning: Garland's surreal horror movie about misogyny may not be for you. For me, though, Men was a feast for the eyes and the brain, one that began with healthy spring greens and ended with disturbingly rare meat.

The deal

Harper (Jessie Buckley), a young London businesswoman, has just lost her estranged husband (Paapa Essiedu) in a horrifying way. Shell-shocked, she gives herself the gift of a holiday in a mansion in the countryside.

The owner of the rental, Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear), is a hail-fellow-well-met type who inquires pointedly about Harper's marital status. Though this makes Harper uncomfortable, she shakes it off and explores the countryside, where she finds some of the peace she craves.

Then, at the end of an abandoned railway tunnel, she spots the figure of a man — a naked man, who looks suspiciously like Geoffrey, following her. We soon discover that every man or boy in the village shares this strange resemblance. (Kinnear plays all of them, with digital assistance.) Harper's getaway becomes a nightmare as she learns that each of these doppelgängers has a sinister interest in her.

Will you like it?

Here's an interesting thing about the horror genre: While much of its audience is male, its default protagonist is female. Viewers seem more comfortable seeing women express terror than men, which is why slasher films typically have "final girls" rather than final boys.

That convention makes horror a fertile genre in which to explore gender relations, and such exploration happens on many levels in Men. Most obviously, the whole creepy village is a materialization of Harper's fears of men and her unresolved feelings toward her husband. Each of the doppelgängers represents a particular flavor of toxicity: the too-friendly landlord, the unsympathetic cop, the taunting kid, the vicar who uses God to justify his misogyny. Buckley skillfully portrays the complex dance that women perform to avoid direct confrontation with any of these types of men — until they can't avoid it anymore.

But Men is also stuffed full of iconography of the Green Man, a cross-cultural symbol of male potency and rebirth. (His image presides over the vicar's church.) So this isn't just a timely allegory of toxic masculinity; it's also a folk horror tale that harks back to a classic of the genre.

In The Wicker Man (1973), a naïve cop investigates a disappearance in a remote English village. Sexy pagan ladies tempt him at every turn, eventually forcing him to play a key role in their ritual of renewal. In Men, Harper is the unwitting outsider whom the town (or the supernatural force that dominates the town) is determined to use to its own ends. But she's far better prepared than the protagonist of The Wicker Man, and she fights back.

So, is this a "You go, girl!" movie? Not in any obvious or crowd-pleasing way, that's for sure. Harper is remote from us, enclosed in her grief, and the whole film has an aesthetic remoteness, too. At first, it's a jewel box of a movie, full of luminous greens like those of John Everett Millais' painting "Ophelia." Later, the palette runs red — yes, with blood — but the carnage still feels more abstract than visceral.

It's easy to see why some moviegoers have walked out of Men, because Garland doesn't focus on scaring the audience. He seems to have an array of motives, some aesthetic and some political, and the result is undeniably a bit of a mess.

But it's a wild, glorious, mesmerizing mess. Men makes me think of an intricately woven tapestry with dueling images on its two sides. On one side is a woman's nightmare of being assailed by an endless stream of men whose love is impossible to distinguish from hate and violence. On the other is an equally hyperbolic male nightmare of being discarded as redundant by women who no longer depend on men for survival, or perhaps even for reproduction.

Unlike the hero of The Wicker Man, Harper isn't easily tempted by pagan sex cults because she's not full of repressed desires: All she really wants is some alone time. She has no use at this point in her life for men and the drama they bring her. And that, to every male character in the movie, is the greatest horror of all.

If you like this, try...

Ex Machina (2014; Kanopy, Showtime, rentable): Tensions between men and women — or woman-shaped robots, anyway — also feature prominently in Garland's breakthrough sci-fi film, in which Alicia Vikander plays an artificial intelligence matching her wits against human Domhnall Gleeson.

Mother! (2017; Kanopy, rentable): One of the 21 films to earn the infamous F CinemaScore is Darren Aronofsky's biblical/environmental allegory, set entirely in one house, in which an artist (Javier Bardem) torments his wife (Jennifer Lawrence). As many folks have noted on Twitter, it would make an ideal double feature with Men, but expect to argue afterward!

Midsommar (2019; Kanopy, Showtime, rentable): Ari Aster's sun-washed horror film is an obvious influence on the trancey style of Men, not to mention its folkloric elements.