The Gloucestershire village at which our heroine (Jessie Buckley) arrives near the beginning of Men is far too pretty to be harmless: you just know something rotten has to lie at the heart of it, inches below all that lush greenery. Alex Garland’s creepy, daffy, already somewhat underrated film – now streamable on Amazon – may probe male toxicity and female endangerment with a distinctly #MeToo-era lens, but it’s also rooted in a sturdy, shivery tradition of British folk horror, where the myths and traditions of the land become their own kind of threat.
They’re embodied in the shape-shifting form of Rory Kinnear, playing the multiple men of this village, but also a single, villainous spirit of masculinity. Riffing obliquely on the mythos of the Green Man, Garland’s script depicts gendered violence as something ancient and ritualised at the heart of our culture, a curse to somehow be broken. That makes it a pleasingly postmodern, self-aware entry in the annals of folk horror cinema, a genre in which earthy violence and sexuality can be more exploitatively presented.
