After Annihilation, it's a new heroine that holds the high dragee of the last movie dAlex Garland. Sombrement entitled Men, this new feature film is largely part of the motion cinema post me too. After blackmailing her husband, Harper (Jessie Buckley) took refuge in the English countryside. A psychological retreat that quickly turns into a nightmare, where the traumas of the past mix, if not blend, with male omnipresence. No respite or truce will be granted. Patriarchate is a matter of time and space control, jealously taken over by Man.
Assault passes, life passes
The first scene of the film (and seen in the trailer) is that of a simple intersection of looks between Harper and her husband fallen from a balcony on the upper floor of a building. An improbable moment, a fraction of a second in reality but an eternity combined with guilt for the widow in her future who promises. A slow-down that recalls a nightmare that would last forever, like a sleep paralysis that would end with a cry of deliverance. Alex Garland chose a tormented heroine, caught up in the past, who has struggled to find peace of mind since his former spouse committed suicide during their separation.
From the first few minutes of the film, as she discovers the home of convalescence where she hopes to reconnect with serenity, Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear), the owner of the place, multiplies the intrusions with small murderous remarks at the border of laughter. He reproaches him for picking an apple from the garden before retracting himself in front of Harper's reaction and pretexting a bad joke. Then followed a remark about the name of Harper, which would imply the presence of a husband. These few breakthroughs in the intimacy of the young woman contrast with the bonhommie and courtesy if British of Geoffrey, a plouc and heir to the peasant court.
Psychological Leaning
Min then multiply the figures of masculinity. Some will play saviors and oppressors alternatively. Systematicly the roles are reversed. When the police intervene while a looted man wanders on the property in his simplest apparatus, the gendarmes call the mentally ill to release him the next day. A situation that recalls how many different events women victims of domestic violence confront with the wall of relatives as the guarantor of public peace, which is normally the police. Complaints sometimes accumulate, victims return to seek help until the day when it is too late to issue an umpteenth alert.
As an address to those who suffer in indifference, Harper drops a « Fucking incapable » leaving a bistro counter, camped by men. The bar is still a well-kept landmark of manhood and its counter is the sanctuary itself. Insult almost returns blasphemy! « Why are you doing this? ? » Harper at one point in the movie while being chased. A symbol of the incomprehension of the sexes in the face of oppression.
Finally, it is all about consent that will never be sought. There is a real psychological mansplaining, which disturbs Harper's desire for peace. The latter is far from the hypersexualized and cartoonal figures found in the slashers of the 1980s. The boy's cup, the determined look, Harper is determined never to give in to fear. Very quickly, we understand that the codes will reverse and that fear is not necessarily on the side of heroin.
This great reversal will reach its climax in the final minutes of the film with the protean incarnation of this masculinity destined to generate the same vehicles of male oppression. A prowess of special effects that gives rise to an endless moult, with the image of a Parthenogenesis infinite of a fly that contains in him the generations to come. Like a Russian doll of patriarchy, unable to bring forth anything other than its own male domination model. But facing Harper's indifference, it's a whole system that collapses and the monster becomes aberration. Men chooses an optimistic epilogue, far from the victim position often conferred on women in horror cinema.
« A woman who is not afraid of men scares them. »
Beyond this metaphor of patriarchy and its figures, the film by Alex Garland suffers from no fault as to its realization, mastered from end to end. The tunnel scene where Harper sings an improvised song where echoes act as a choir is a candid success and a great moment of cinema. Yet the effect of suspense ends up breathing away, as long as the metaphor of this toxic masculinity goes so far as to detricate itself at the expense of the plot. The fear will only be outlined in the first scenes, then nothing. It's as if fear, like its combative heroine, was no longer on the spectator.
Men then locks up in an accumulation of fantastic scenes that doubtless forget that all the strength of the genre traditionally lies in the permissiveness between real and unreal. By tilting widely in the second and focusing on the allegorical register, Men is probably too predictable and that is a shame. With only two women at the casting, including a secondary character from a distance and a male omnipresence, the characters clumsyly articulate together, if not to denounce the little space they leave to Women. Where one would probably have expected a confined atmosphere closer to the village of Resident Evil 4 or that of pecores of Issue, the director prefers to lock up his story psychologically.
The image of the forbidden fruit and the guilt of the one who welcomed the apple upon arrival in the property, Men is not always subtle and uses sometimes artificial strings. It is all the more regrettable that the creation and the play of actors are not in default for a single moment. However, Men remains a film with interesting ideas but which would probably have won to choose a more powerful format to better reveal its critique of a society still widely trusted by men.
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... Opinion of MaG (KillerS7ven): From the image of the forbidden fruit and the guilt of the one who welcomed the apple upon arrival in the property, Men is not always subtle and uses sometimes artificial strings. It is all the more regrettable that the creation and the play of actors are not in default for a single moment. However, Men remains a film with interesting ideas but which would probably have gained from choosing a more powerful format to better reveal his criticism of a society still widely trusted by men. [...]