Men is a purposefully strange and almost ethereal film from Alex Garland, the newest addition to A24's ever-increasing stable of idiosyncratic horror stories. Focusing on the recently widowed Harper (Jessie Buckley) taking a trip into the country to get away for a bit, the woman finds herself increasingly beset and surrounded by off-putting men (all played by Rory Kinnear), with the situation growing steadily stranger and more dangerous as time wears on. It's a purposefully off-putting and effectively crafted film, one that trades typical horror for genuinely unsettling imagery to highlight the way the men in her life have come to see Harper -- and her attempts to break out of those limitations.
During a roundtable interview attended by CBR, Men writer/director Alex Garland and star Jessie Buckley spoke about the surreal but consistently human elements of the world that bled into the film and why Garland tries to avoid referencing specific films in his work.
While it may not have seemed like an obvious inspiration, Garland has been open about Attack on Titan being an influence on Men, noting how "I got kind of slapped around the face creatively, I think, by watching Attack on Titan with my daughter. It was taking human forms and making, in some ways, quite subtle changes once that leans in a way that I like towards ridiculousness... because I think actually, ridiculousness is quite an important part in Men. A kind of funny... patheticness, a kind of silliness. In some respects, that sits alongside the horror and the strangeness. It's important that those two things sit right up against each other. When I saw Attack on Titan, I could see how inventive and creative it was. It made me think really hard. I spent that Christmas doing loads of sketches of forms, and then that became [a sequence from Men]."
Garland also admitted that elements of Wicker Man may have bled into the film unconsciously, but that wasn't his intent to draw directly on other films. "I try to avoid making movies about other movies," Garland explained. "I'm aware that other movies will filter into things... There's a shot [in Men], which is like a first-person running shot. Even as we were setting up, I thought, 'Oh, yeah, Evil Dead. Right.' So that happens, but I'm not doing knowing nudges and winks towards the audience... I'll make films with an awareness of other films, but I'm trying to make the movie about something in a way, not as cinema if that makes sense, but as something, as it were, in the real world."
It's one of the elements of Men that lends so much surprising and effective imagery, as it becomes a singular feeling of a film instead of a typical horror story. Reflecting on the surprises she discovered with her character, Harper, Buckley recalled how she was surprised by how "in some ways, Harper is somebody who's ultimately choosing life in some shape or form, even if that means facing the scariest thing... She has been kind of chased by all these monsters of some sort, but for me, there was something complicit she had agency within, that she wasn't a victim. She was somebody who was actually walking towards that horror instead of running away from it."
Bouncing off of Buckley was Rory Kinnear, who plays many roles in the film as the various men whom Harper encounters in the small village she's trying to take a holiday in. Buckley and Garland both were vocal about Kinnear's talents in the film, with Buckey explaining how she "thinks it's sheer genius, what [Rory's] done. Every time he would step on set as a new man, the whole tone and mood in the house, not just with me but with the whole crew would change... That's [a] testament to Rory as an extraordinary actor, when you have somebody like him who is so brilliant, and it is such a huge feat and such a very delicate and quite bold line that he had to thread every single day."
Those human elements contrast strongly against Men's almost dreamlike surreal qualities, with weird events and an uneasy calmness permeating the film until a truly shocking third act. For Garland, a trip into the surreal isn't a new experience in the slightest. "I think I've always been making surrealist stuff," Garland explained. "In fact, I began as a novelist years and years ago. I was like 24, and when I think back on that book, which is about backpackers in Thailand, there are lots of surrealist elements. I think that [there] always is, and it's partly because I think life is strange. I just think life is really strange. I think people are strange, and the world is strange. Our interactions with each other are incredibly surreal and sort of dreamlike and confusing."
"There's a film -- I'm shooting a film right now, out in Atlanta. It's a war movie. We came across by the side of the road, when we were on tech scouts looking for locations, a bunch of abandoned Christmas decorations from somebody who'd set up a winter wonderland, and then they'd gone bankrupt. This stuff was just scattered all over fields. I said, 'Grab it! Talk to the guy who owns the fields. Let's have it, and we'll use it as a backdrop.' That is pure surrealism... and I didn't create that. That was found in the world. So I think Annihilation is full of surrealism. I think Ex Machina is full of surrealism -- there's a disco sequence within it, which is a surrealist beat. It's just, it's like what anyway, right? That's what it is to me. It's sort of slightly comic, slightly surreal. That's what I think the world is like. So I think it's always there."
Catch Alex Garland's Men in theaters May 20.