The Insidious Men Manifests the Horror of Being a Woman

As a woman walking down the street, doing my job, going to dinner, waiting for the bus, having drinks with a friend — there is almost always a moment when I glance over my shoulder, grip the keys a little tighter and mute the music blaring through my earbuds. I sense that I’m not alone. 

This is a familiar routine for so many women. Our common fear? Men.

As journalist Mary Dickson notes in the ever-topical 1998 PBS documentary No Safe Place: Violence Against Women, “Ask any woman you know. You always have a plan.”

Here are the cold facts: According to the World Health Organization, 1 in 3 women worldwide has been subjected to either physical and/or sexual intimate-partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime, mostly by men.

For some, a movie title as simple as Men is enough to inspire dread. Writer-director Alex Garland’s latest might be one of the most insidious horror films in recent years.

The narrative itself is relatively simple. After Harper (a typically spellbinding Jessie Buckley) tells her husband James (Paapa Essiedu who, as always, lit up his scenes but could’ve been used more) that she’s leaving him, he erupts into a violent argument with her, telling her he will kill himself if she follows through. It turns out that he does indeed die — gruesomely — but whether it is intentional is unclear. What is certain is that Harper is traumatized and takes off to a sprawling rented home in the English countryside to get away and heal. There, she encounters a man, in many variations.

Bear with me. Among them, there is Jeffrey, the “nice guy” groundskeeper who makes it his mission to “protect” her; a nude man who sprouted like a weed in the woods and who Harper encounters on a walk; a police officer who minimizes the threat Harper feels after she realizes the nude man may be stalking her; and a vicar who has a suspiciously dry mouth and wandering eyes. All these men project a grotesque thirst and lasciviousness. And all are played to equally hilarious and chilling effect by Rory Kinnear, a long-underrated actor who gets his due here tenfold.

With each character, his appearance shifts ever so slightly, from buck-toothed Jeffrey to the silver-haired vicar. His eyes, however, remain eerily foreboding. They’re the type that women fear at night — eyes that might be watching, that might be following. But, of course, #NotAllMen.

As each of the Kinnears makes Harper the subject of his perversions, they actively gaslight her and make her question her own motivations and fears. Take, for instance, when she confides in the vicar about what happened with James, and he tells her she should have given him another chance — that “men do strike women sometimes; it’s not nice, but it’s not a capital offense.”

Toxic masculinity permeates, the horror of which is most relatable in two key moments. On her first day away, Harper joyously listens to her voice echo in a cavernous tunnel, only to run away when she spots a male silhouette at the end of it. Later, she howls in pain at a church in the countryside while having flashbacks about James. Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury’s electrifying score does half the work here — those echoes and screams sound more like sirens that repeat with growing dread as Harper’s nightmarish getaway unfolds.

As with his past works Ex Machina, Annihilation and Devs, Garland explores a familiar theme here: the anxieties and tensions we create between us, and how they come to define the human condition.

This particular social commentary — replete with biblical and pagan imagery, and a third act stuffed with Cronenbergian levels of body horror (like, bring a paper bag with you) — feels much more abstract and open-ended than his other explorations, making for more of a singular feeling than a film.

While it certainly isn’t for everyone, it does feel like required viewing, if only so it isn’t just we women who will walk home after the credits roll and take one more look behind us. Just to be sure, just to be safe.