“Visionary” is liberally used to describe directors these days, but if any filmmaker has earned the title, it’s writer/director Alex Garland, whose work has pushed forward some of the major trends in horror and sci-fi filmmaking over the past two decades. He penned the screenplays for “28 Days Later” and “Sunshine,” and directed the the coolly intelligent “Ex Machina,” as well as the feverishly hallucinatory “Annihilation.” Garland uses genre to explore the nature of human existence, and the ways in which human beings struggle to connect across planes of being, both organic and mechanic. In his latest film, “Men,” Garland turns toward the domestic, finding the horror within the confines of the home, and ripping it out from within.
With “Men,” Garland remains rooted in the natural world, but in this folk horror riff, the events that unfold are so entirely unnatural that some images and concepts are impossible to unsee or forget. Garland challenges the natural order in order to examine the many monstrous forms that emotional abuse and trauma can take on a human being’s psyche, and he does so in a Grand Guignol of grotesquerie. Yet after all that blood and gore, too much remains mysterious about “Men,” as Garland poses big questions that remain unanswered.
Men,” which calls to mind Robin Hardy’s 1973 “The Wicker Man,” Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” and any manner of garden-variety home invasion slasher films, is deep with reference and also unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. Jessie Buckley stars as Harper, a woman devastated after witnessing the suicide of her husband, James (Paapa Essiedu). Seeking some space and quiet to rest and heal in nature, Harper rents a sprawling country home in a tiny, verdant village (the film was shot on location in Gloucestershire, England).
