‘Men’ Film Review: Jessie Buckley and All the Rory Kinnears Populate Alex Garland’s Eccentric Horror
thewrap.comout there.Whatever’s happening in the movie’s opening fragments of unnerving imagery — sparks hitting a waterfront apartment’s railing, an eerie orange glow, the nosebleed on a terrified-looking Harper (Buckley) — we know it’s why our protagonist is next seen driving her Ford Fiesta to the English countryside as singer-songwriter Leslie Duncan’s plaintive classic “Love Song” accompanies the rolling, tranquil scenery.
Arriving at her cozy, stately vacation-rental manor tucked inside a hedged boundary, Harper plucks an apple from the tree out front and bites. (Does Garland’s business card read “Cheeky Allegorist”?)There to show her around is the eccentric owner Geoffrey, played by a prosthetic-enhanced Rory Kinnear.
His colorful Britishisms (“wiggly-wobbly way” and “scrumping”) and awkward humor are intended to further signal that Harper — whom we gather from recurring memory flashes is recovering from the tragic end of a turbulent marriage with an emotionally abusive man (an intense Paapa Essiedu, “I May Destroy You”) — has decamped securely into the quaint, bucolic charms of Wodehouse country.On a solo nature walk, however, which Garland uneasily draws out with excessive cutaways to her verdant surroundings, we begin to gather Harper is neither alone nor exactly safe.
One clue is the naked, grubby-looking man staring at her from a distance; his prowling reappearance outside the property (a genuinely tense sequence) is another, provoking a call to the police and his arrest.
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