Men

Standing in the middle of a damp, echoing railway tunnel, Jessie Buckley begins to sing. She isn’t performing a West End number; she’s testing the acoustics, looping her voice into a haunting, accidental folk melody. It’s a beautiful, serene moment—until a dark silhouette appears at the far end of the tunnel and starts sprinting toward her. That’s the Alex Garland experience in a nutshell: taking something lush and pastoral and curdling it until you’re left with a pit of dread in your stomach. I watched this on my laptop while my neighbor was loudly power-washing his driveway, and the rhythmic drone actually synced up perfectly with the unsettling score, making the whole experience feel like a home invasion in progress.

The Uncanny Valley of the English Countryside

Garland, the brain behind Ex Machina and Annihilation, has a knack for making environments feel like they’re breathing. In Men, the English countryside isn't a postcard; it’s a vibrant, aggressive green that feels almost predatory. Jessie Buckley plays Harper, a woman fleeing a personal trauma that we see in jagged, painful flashbacks involving her husband, James (Paapa Essiedu). She rents a manor from Geoffrey, a bumbling, "too-friendly" local played by Rory Kinnear.

Then things get weird. As Harper explores the village, she encounters a vicar, a policeman, a troubled teenager, and a naked stalker. The catch? They all have Rory Kinnear’s face. It’s a brilliant, unsettling bit of casting that bypasses logic and goes straight for the lizard brain. It taps into that specific female experience of feeling like no matter where you go, you’re running into the same archetypes of dismissal, aggression, or "well-actually" condescension. Kinnear is an absolute chameleon here, shifting from harmless buffoonery to skin-crawling menace without ever feeling like a caricature.

A24 and the "Elevated Horror" Industrial Complex

Released in 2022, Men arrived at a time when the "A24 Horror" brand was reaching a fever pitch. We were right in the thick of the "elevated horror" discourse—that annoying trend where people try to claim a movie isn't really a horror flick because it has themes. Let's be clear: Men is a horror movie. It uses folk-horror tropes—the isolated village, the pagan imagery, the Green Man—and updates them for a contemporary conversation about toxic masculinity and inherited trauma.

However, Garland isn’t exactly subtle. If you’re looking for a nuanced, multi-layered metaphor that requires a PhD to decode, you might find this a bit too on-the-nose. The film basically yells its themes at you with a megaphone. But honestly? In an era of franchise bloat and "safe" streaming bets, I’d much rather watch a director swing for the fences and accidentally hit the catcher in the face than watch another committee-approved ghost story. Garland had a $6.5 million budget and used it to make one of the most polarizing studio-backed films of the decade. That’s worth a few minutes of your time just for the audacity of it.

The Birth of... Something

We have to talk about the final twenty minutes. Without spoiling the specifics, the climax of Men features some of the most jaw-dropping practical body horror put to film since the 1980s. It’s a sequence of biological Russian nesting dolls that left me staring at the screen in a state of "what on earth am I witnessing?" It’s gross, it’s hypnotic, and the ending feels like a biology textbook had a fever dream about David Cronenberg.

The makeup effects team, led by Sarah Twomey (who also appears as a police officer), deserves every award for making the impossible look agonizingly real. The CGI is used sparingly to touch up the Kinnear-cloning, but the heavy lifting is done with prosthetics and buckets of slime. It’s a testament to Garland’s commitment to the "visceral" (sorry, I meant gutsy and raw) nature of folk horror. He doesn't want you to think your way out of the movie; he wants you to feel your way out through a layer of cold sweat.

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The production was actually a bit of a pandemic miracle. It was filmed during the tail end of the UK lockdowns, which explains why the village feels so eerily empty. That isolation wasn't just a creative choice; it was a logistical necessity that ended up heightening the film’s sense of paranoia. Also, that chanting score? It was composed by Geoff Barrow (of Portishead fame) and Ben Salisbury. They used Jessie Buckley's own voice as the primary "instrument," distorting and layering her shouts and breaths to create a soundtrack that feels like it’s coming from inside Harper’s own head.

Men isn't going to be for everyone. It’s a movie that invites you to a beautiful garden and then proceeds to show you the rot underneath every stone. If you can handle the blatant metaphors and a climax that will make you rethink your entire existence, it’s a rewarding, singular experience. It’s a film about the ghosts we carry and the way society often looks like a funhouse mirror reflecting our worst fears back at us. Even if you hate where it goes, you won't forget the journey. Just maybe don't watch it while you're eating dinner.