Alex Garland’s Men is one of those films that walks into the room with its collar popped, smoking an unfiltered cigarette labeled “METAPHOR,” and mutters, “You probably won’t get this.” It’s the kind of horror movie that wants to be deep, provocative, and symbolic—but ends up feeling like a drunk art student screaming “THE PATRIARCHY!” into a fog machine.
This is a movie about trauma. And masculinity. And grief. And toxic cycles. And… trees. Maybe. Who can say? Garland can’t. He’s too busy gesturing vaguely at mythological archetypes while throwing another naked man into the woods like he’s hosting a discount Renaissance fair with A24 money.
Let’s start with the plot—what little there is. Harper (Jessie Buckley), a recently widowed woman, retreats to a remote countryside estate to process the traumatic death of her emotionally abusive husband. A husband who, it’s worth noting, dies in one of the most over-edited “did-he-jump-or-fall” sequences ever captured on screen—shot through filters that scream, “Look, it’s important! Trauma is now slow motion!”
Harper rents a gorgeous old manor, complete with copper tubs, a garden, and a landlord named Geoffrey who is the human embodiment of a teacup full of bad decisions. Geoffrey is played by Rory Kinnear, who goes on to play every other male character in the film. Priest? Rory. Schoolboy? Rory. Naked stalker man covered in bark and self-harm? Also Rory. It’s an acting flex, sure—but it quickly stops being impressive and starts feeling like a theater camp dare gone too far.
Kinnear deserves credit for the commitment. He stretches his range from “mildly creepy” to “entirely unhinged” without blinking. At one point, he plays a literal Green Man—complete with leaves sprouting from his face and a full-frontal stroll through Harper’s psyche. But the point of all this? Garland never says. Or worse, he thinks he says, but he just points toward The Wicker Man and shrugs.
Every man in the film is, in some form, a manifestation of Harper’s trauma. They gaslight her, threaten her, mimic her words, and—eventually—start splitting open, birthing new versions of themselves in a grotesque ouroboros of toxic masculinity. Yes, you read that right. The third act involves a parade of Rory Kinnears giving horrifying, gooey birth to… more Rory Kinnears. It’s like Multiplicity if it were directed by David Cronenberg and funded by an angry feminist zine from 2008.
This sequence lasts for what feels like a geological epoch. A naked man gives vaginal birth from his back. Then the newborn man gives birth through his mouth. Then the next gives birth through… somewhere. It’s horrifying. It’s ambitious. And it’s so utterly on the nose that you can practically hear Garland behind the camera whispering, “Get it? Men. They’re reborn from each other’s trauma. It’s like mythology. Please clap.”
Jessie Buckley does her best to ground the chaos. She gives a committed performance, radiating strength, confusion, and simmering rage. But she’s acting opposite a Greek chorus of gender-coded hallucinations and the world’s most exhausting allegory. Her character never gets the dignity of a resolution—just a long series of moody stares, mild gasps, and slowly closing doors.
The film is beautiful, in that sterile A24 way. Every frame is dripping in atmospheric dread. Trees loom. Shadows pulse. Even the fruit rots poetically. But eventually, it’s hard not to notice that all this atmosphere is hiding the fact that nothing is actually happening. Harper walks. She cries. She has a flashback. A man tells her her emotions are incorrect. Repeat until the screen bleeds symbolism.
The sound design is also impressive at first, until Garland becomes so enamored with it that he begins remixing it like an experimental DJ at a feminist rave. Harper’s echoing vocalizations in a tunnel early in the film are eerie and artful—until they get sampled later like she’s accidentally dropped an album on Spotify called Screaming Into the Void: Vol. 1.
Garland wants to make a point about the eternal cycle of abuse and how women inherit the sins of men across generations. Fine. That’s worth exploring. But the execution here is so literal, so in-your-face grotesque, that it feels less like commentary and more like a haunted PowerPoint. The movie doesn’t examine gender trauma—it finger-paints with it.
And let’s talk about the ending. After Harper witnesses the matryoshka-style nightmare of Rory Kinnears birthing each other like Russian trauma dolls, her dead husband finally reappears, still mangled from his death but very much monologuing about how she made him feel. It’s supposed to be a climactic moment of emotional confrontation. Instead, it plays like a bad improv scene where one guy is just too committed to staying in character.
The final line? A smile. A quiet moment. A fade to black. And the audience is left to sit in stunned silence and wonder if they’ve just witnessed something profound or a very expensive student film about the dangers of dating men who like Fight Club.
Final verdict? Men is a stunningly shot, boldly acted, and deeply confused mess of a movie. It’s a film so convinced of its own thematic heft that it forgets to entertain, engage, or make a coherent point. It wants to be folk horror by way of The Second Sex, but ends up as The Babadook for people who post angry tweets about gender studies professors without actually reading the syllabus.
Watch it if you enjoy high-concept horror with zero emotional payoff, or if you’ve ever wondered what it would look like if someone directed a TED Talk using only mucus and antlers. Everyone else? Maybe just call your therapist and leave the forest spirits alone.
Because sometimes, the scariest thing of all… is a writer-director who thinks subtlety is for cowards.
