Cannes Review: Alex Garland’s thriller ‘Men’ makes its point with half-baked politics [Grade: B]

Men will make you want to rewatch Get Out. Alex Garland’s latest is every bit as frightening and graphic as we might’ve expected (and hoped). But undercooked politics, and Garland’s failure to harmonise it with Men’s well-done horror, make it a respectable effort rather than a particularly memorable one.

Jessie Buckley is Harper Marlowe, a recently-widowed woman in dire need of some peace and quiet. That she hopes to attain in an ornate country house in Cotson, Hertfordshire, a stuffy village a few hours away from London. There are shades of Withnail & I in Harper’s clamour out of the city — and horrified bafflement at what she finds. But rather than a creepy uncle and a punter selling fish out of his coat pockets at the pub, what Harper finds in Cotson, or rather what finds her, could threaten her life. Worse still, the mysterious presence evokes Harper’s husband James (Paapa Essiedu), whose gruesome death plays on a loop in her head.

In a performance not unlike Kind Hearts and Coronets, the Ealing comedy in which Alec Guinness plays eight different people, Rory Kinnear is Harper’s suspiciously affable landlord Geoffrey, and a few others. Geoffrey wears gauche English clothes and has teeth out of The Simpsons’ seminal “Big Book of British Smiles.” He fumbles a question about where Mrs Harper’s “hubby” is, and appears to speak entirely in only the worst British idioms available to him. Geoffrey’s also entirely harmless, Harper tells her friend Riley (Gayle Rankin) over FaceTime. Or is he.

Garland is one of the world’s best writer-directors at summoning grounded feelings of fear. In Ex Machina, these threats have an absurd quality; in Annihilation, they prompt awe. Men has a more didactic intention, which is to turn micro-aggressions toward Harper by the film’s titular men into the stuff of nightmares. In that way it’s not too different to Get Out, in which Jordan Peele thought up his own analogy for the Black experience, and made the best horror movie in years, for just over $2 million. 

But in Men, didactic is the name of the game, and Harper’s creepy (and worse) experiences never particularly coalesce with the haunted house horror which occupies most of the film’s runtime. That is all done relatively well — Garland has been doing this for a while — but the message and the madness never quite marry. Garland became a well-known name after his bestselling novel The Beach was adapted by Danny Boyle for a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. That story’s theme of paradise gone wrong has, in a way, dominated Garland’s career, particularly his work as a director. In a new A24-backed film starring Jessie Buckley, it makes perfect sense to apply that formula to issues of sexism and society’s abundance of malevolent men. What Men also suggests is that it might be time for Garland to move on.

Grade: B

This review is from the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Men is currently playing in U.S. theaters from A24.