Review: Men (2022)

Londoner Jessie Buckley needs a break after the death of her husband, so she rents a house in a small country village. Soon after, a disturbed and nude man tries to break in. Two things strike her as disturbing; 1) The rather disinterested attitude of the locals towards this disturbance, and 2) Said locals all seem to look alike. As in they all look a lot like Rory Kinnear in various guises. And that’s when things turn even more disturbing…and bizarre.

 

I seem to be on a lonely island of my own here, but this film from writer-director Alex Garland (“Ex-Machina”) is second only to Phil Tippett’s “Mad God” as my favourite film of 2022. I don’t think I’ve felt this isolated in praising a film so strongly since “Repo Men” was named as my favourite film of 2010, but this seems to be the one A24 film that people either were disappointed by or actively despise. That’s OK, I’ll have it. I really liked this one. If you like folk horror and/or you like psychological horror, and if you’re not a thin-skinned anti-woke misogynist, you might just like this one too if you haven’t already seen it.

 

I kept waiting for it to all fall apart, and thankfully it never did. It left me alternately laughing and disgusted, sometimes at the same moments. I might even like it more than “Ex-Machina”, a very fine film in its own right. The country scenery is gloomy yet attractive, and there’s something quietly unsettling about the very slow camera movement that has you on edge from very early on. Shot composition is particularly on point, even if the occasional shot is a touch too arty for my particular taste. Still, all those doomy and gloomy low-hanging clouds were very much up my atmospheric alley.

 

Thematically I initially felt “Repulsion” vibes from it (and that’s my vote for scariest movie ever made), but Garland takes things into an even more bizarre and surreal direction the longer the film goes on. Some of the imagery is creepy AF and I’m not referring to Rory Kinnear letting his willy hang out. And once the third or fourth Kinnear lookalike shows up, I started to find the whole thing genuinely funny – and I believe it’s intentional. At one point in my notes I was praising an interesting performance playing one of the locals and…nope, that was a well-hidden Kinnear too. You got me there. It’s easily the best work he’s done to date. The absolutely bizarre and disgusting finale is probably just a touch too absurd, but it had already won me over by then. All I’ll say is there’s quite a bit of Cronenberg to it.

 

Genuinely surprising, disgusting, bizarre, funny, and absolutely compelling film unlike anything else I’d seen in 2022. Highly recommended.

 

Rating: B