A widow arrives in the Cotswolds hoping for quiet healing after unimaginable loss, yet the rolling hills and ancient stone villages soon reveal a far darker presence lurking beneath the surface. Alex Garland’s 2022 film Men turns this personal tragedy into a piercing examination of how grief collides with centuries of patriarchal patterns, forcing viewers to confront uncomfortable truths about male violence and its endless repetition.
This piece looks closely at the film’s blend of folk horror traditions, striking body horror sequences, and layered performances while tracing its connections to English folklore and Garland’s own evolving body of work. We will also consider the production realities, symbolic details, and lasting cultural ripples that continue to spark conversation years after release.
The Lush Trap of Mourning
Grief propels Harper, a young widow played with raw vulnerability by Jessie Buckley, to seek solace in a remote Cotswolds cottage following her husband’s fatal plunge from a London balcony. Their marriage, we learn through fractured flashbacks, was a cauldron of emotional turmoil, marked by his manipulative accusations of infidelity and a final, desperate act that leaves her shattered. As she arrives in this postcard-perfect village, the air hums with an undercurrent of unease, the stone arches of an ancient church looming like skeletal fingers against the verdant backdrop.
The narrative unfurls with deceptive tranquillity. Harper wanders the sun-dappled woods, capturing footage on her phone, only to witness a boy’s fatal accident, his body mangled in a grotesque echo of her husband’s fall. This inciting incident ripples outward, drawing her into confrontation with the village’s inhabitants, all men who regard her with a mix of pity, suspicion, and barely veiled hostility. Rory Kinnear dominates these encounters, shape-shifting through a gallery of masculine archetypes: the affable landlord Geoffrey with his forced smiles and ripe fruits; the leering vicar spouting biblical misogyny; the naked stalker who pursues her through the forest, his nudity a primal assertion of dominance.
Director Alex Garland, cinematographer Benjamin Kračun, and production designer Michelle Day craft a mise-en-scène where nature itself conspires against Harper. Apples swell obscenely on branches, symbolising fertility twisted into decay; maypoles and church carvings depict women birthing endless male progeny in nightmarish loops. The film’s pacing builds inexorably, from subtle psychological barbs to accusations of her guilt in her husband’s death and on to visceral eruptions, culminating in a birth scene of unparalleled body horror where the impossible made flesh challenges every notion of creation and punishment.
Key crew shine through technical prowess. Composer Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow’s score blends folk motifs with dissonant electronics, amplifying isolation; the sound design layers rustling leaves with guttural moans, turning the countryside symphony sinister. Garland’s script, honed from years of screenwriting prestige, layers ambiguity: is this supernatural curse or collective male delusion? The village men’s persistence, rebuffed advances morphing into ritualistic pursuit, mirrors real-world gaslighting and roots fantasy in uncomfortably tangible truths. At Dyerbolical we have often noted how such grounded unease makes the horror linger long after the credits roll.
From Flashback to Frenzy: Narrative Layers
Flashbacks intercut the present, revealing Harper’s husband James’s decline: his feigned vulnerability masking control, culminating in a balcony standoff where accusations fly like daggers. “You did this to me,” he gasps, before leaping, a moment Buckley sells with agonised authenticity. These vignettes humanise the horror, grounding supernatural excess in personal trauma, while foreshadowing the film’s core thesis on male fragility as violence’s seedbed.
Folklore’s Dark Underbelly
Garland draws deeply from England’s pagan heritage, invoking green man motifs and medieval church iconography where female figures expel phallic serpents or birth armies of identical sons. The film’s title nods to these archetypes, positioning men not as individuals but as a monolithic force, eternally renewing through grotesque parturition. This is not mere pastiche; it reclaims folk horror traditions from films like The Wicker Man, but inverted, with woman as both victim and avenger, nature’s wrath incarnate.
Production challenges abounded. Shot during COVID restrictions in Gloucestershire, the team navigated unpredictable weather to capture that lush, oppressive greenery. Garland’s insistence on practical effects for the climactic sequence, prosthetics by Tristan Penna evoking H.R. Giger’s biomechanical nightmares, lent visceral authenticity and eschewed CGI for tangible revulsion. Budgeted modestly at around £10 million, the film’s A24 backing allowed artistic risks, from Kinnear’s transformative makeup to Buckley’s immersion in dialect and distress.
In genre context, it evolves the arthouse horror approach Garland explored earlier, blending unease with splatter payoff. Where Ari Aster externalises female rage in Midsommar, Garland internalises male toxicity, using the rural idyll to expose urban hypocrisies. Christianity clashes with paganism overtly: the vicar’s sermons on Eve’s sin dovetail with stone carvings of her punished eternally, suggesting faith as patriarchy’s oldest enforcer. Similar tensions appear in later works such as Garland’s own Civil War from 2024, which continues probing societal fractures.
Class undertones simmer too. Harper, a city sophisticate, clashes with rustics whose traditions brook no outsider critique. Their pub debates on gender roles echo Brexit-era divides, Garland subtly critiquing insularity without preachiness. This socio-political weave elevates the film beyond shocks and positions it as a state-of-the-nation horror that still resonates in ongoing cultural conversations through 2026.
Symbolism’s Savage Bite
Apples recur as loaded symbols: offered by Geoffrey as hospitality, they rot into accusations of temptation, evoking Eden’s fall. Harper’s bites yield juice like blood, merging sustenance with sin. The tunnel sequence, lit by flickering torchlight, compresses cosmic horror into claustrophobic pursuit, Kinnear’s nude form a blank canvas for primal id.
Body horror peaks in the finale, a symphony of squelching flesh and anguished cries. The birthing defies biology, smaller replicas emerging from larger, an infinite regress of aggression mirroring how abusers replicate trauma across generations. Buckley’s performance anchors this: her screams blend terror, rage, and catharsis, face contorted in Hecate-like fury.
The green man’s foliate head motif, carved into church stones, embodies regenerative masculinity. Her husband’s echoes in every man faced underscore projection’s horror. May Day rituals frame pursuit as communal rite, blurring consent and coercion. This lexicon of visual cues builds dread, each element compounding thematic weight. Critics lauded the film’s boldness, though some decried its one-note menagerie; yet Kinnear’s virtuosity, from bumbling to bestial, nuances the monolith and humanises without excusing.
Echoes in the Canon
Reception split audiences: the Cannes premiere drew walkouts amid cheers, its uncompromised vision polarising. Box office remained modest at roughly £6 million worldwide, but streaming longevity and discourse endure, spawning podcasts dissecting its feminism. Influences ripple into contemporaries like She Will, affirming Garland’s vanguard status.
Legacy lies in provocation: sparking debates on #MeToo-era masculinity, its imagery haunting feminist horror discourse. Remake whispers persist, though Garland’s originals resist dilution. The film continues to shape discussions around representation in horror well into the mid-2020s.
Conclusion
This harrowing story weaves personal loss with archetypal dread, unmasking manhood’s shadows without resolution’s comfort. In its refusal to simplify evil, the film demands reckoning, a mirror for our divided times where ancient rites meet modern fractures.
Director in the Spotlight
Alex Garland, born in 1970 in London to a literary family, his father a cartoonist and mother a psychotherapist, began as a novelist. His debut The Beach from 1996 sold over a million copies and was adapted into a 2000 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Transitioning to screenwriting, Garland penned 28 Days Later in 2002, revitalising zombie cinema with Danny Boyle; its sequel 28 Weeks Later followed in 2007. Sunshine from 2007, another Boyle collaboration, fused sci-fi with philosophical heft.
Directorial debut Ex Machina in 2014 garnered Oscar nods for its AI thriller elegance, starring Alicia Vikander and Domhnall Gleeson. Annihilation from 2018, adapting Jeff VanderMeer, delved into cosmic body horror with Natalie Portman, its shimmering visuals and existential dread cementing Garland’s auteur status. TV miniseries Devs from 2020 explored determinism via quantum tech, starring Nick Offerman.
Garland’s influences span Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, and H.P. Lovecraft, blended with British kitchen-sink realism. A vocal Brexit critic, his works probe technology’s dehumanising edge and nature’s indifference. Upcoming projects include a 28 Years Later sequel trilogy. His oeuvre evolves from speculative scripts to visually poetic horrors, challenging viewers’ moral compasses across each new project.
Actor in the Spotlight
Rory Kinnear, born 1978 in London, son of late Bond actor Roy Kinnear and actress Catherine Gold, trained at LAMDA. Theatre breakout came with Chichester Festival roles, earning Olivier Awards for The Threepenny Opera in 2005 and Cyrano de Bergerac in 2010. Shakespearean prowess shone in National Theatre’s Othello opposite Adrian Lester.
Screen career ignited with Black Mirror: The National Anthem in 2011, then Penny Dreadful from 2014 to 2016 as The Creature, blending pathos and menace. Bond villain Tanner in Skyfall from 2012, Spectre from 2015, and No Time to Die from 2021 showcased suave authority. Recent turns include Our Flag Means Death from 2022 onward as Captain Izzie Hands, earning Emmy buzz.
Kinnear’s versatility, voicing The Ministry of Time in 2024, stems from stage-honed physicality, evident in his multi-role mastery here. Awards include multiple Oliviers and BIFA nominations. His chameleonic range elevates ensemble horrors to profound statements that linger with audiences.
Bibliography
Bradshaw, P. (2022) Men review – Alex Garland’s bold, divisive rape-revenge horror. The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/may/23/men-review-alex-garland-jessie-buckley-rory-kinnear (Accessed: 15 October 2024).
Hand, D. (2021) Folk horror: hours of gory, weird films to transport you from 2021. The Conversation. Available at: https://theconversation.com/folk-horror-hours-of-gory-weird-films-to-transport-you-from-2021-174982 (Accessed: 15 October 2024).
Jones, A. (2018) Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies. Strange Attractor Press.
Scovell, A. (2017) Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Auteur Publishing.
Garland, A. (2022) Interview: Men and the Monstrousness of Men. Sight & Sound. Available at: https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/men-alex-garland-interview (Accessed: 15 October 2024).
BFI (2022) Men: Production Notes. British Film Institute.
VanderMeer, J. (2014) Annihilation. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
IMDb (2024) Men (2022) – Full Cast & Crew. Available at: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13841850/ (Accessed: 10 November 2024).
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