Dir: Alex Garland. Starring: Jessie Buckley, Rory Kinnear, Paapa Essiedu, Gayle Rankin. 15, 100 minutes.
Alex Garland’s new horror film Men is a trippy exercise in self-flagellation, a bloody folktale meditating on male malevolence. It frames men as an ancient, insurmountable evil and misogyny as a bogeyman of unknowable origin. Certainly, that sounds damning (I can already hear hands revving up over computer keyboards, quaking with indignation), but who does Men’s broad-brush statement actually serve? For all its self-awareness, is the film just a vehicle with which to excuse men of any accountability? I suspect so.
