Alex Garland’s new folk horror film Men is released today in United States, while the audience of the director’s home country should wait a while until Men releases on June 1, in United Kingdom. Garland first rose to fame with his independent sci-fi masterpiece Ex Machina , released in 2014 and received great critical acclaim for its take on artificial intelligence. He then followed it with another sci-fi spectacle starring Natalie Portman, called Annihilation based on the novel of the same by Jeff VanderMeer, which is released on Netflix and received positive reviews. Alex also created a sci-fi miniseries called Devs for the content hub FX on Hulu, exploring the topics of artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
His new folk horror film starring Jessie Buckley and Rory Kinnear is produced and distributed by A24, who had scored a big success this year with Everything Everywhere All at Once.
What is the Premise of Men?
The official plot summary for Men is as follows:
“A young woman goes on a solo holiday in the English countryside after the death of her husband. While visiting, she is stalked by men with the same faces.”
What the Reviewers are Saying?
The film currently holds a 76% score on Rotten Tomatoes out of 108 reviews with an average score of 6.8/10. Metacritic assigned a score of 66 out of 100, indicating generally favorable reviews.
We also rounded up some of the reviews for Men currently available online:
“Garland, like a coroner performer an autopsy, surveys his specimen with clinical rigor, gallows humor and the faintest hint of sorrow. Men are the worst. But “Men” is still something to see.”
-Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times
“This film will not be for everyone, including big horror fans. That’s par for the course when it comes to horror releases from A24, but even then, I do wonder if sensationalist choices outweigh incisive observations about reality”
-Aaron Neuwirth, We Live Entertainment
“Garland and cinematographer Rob Hardy do a magnificent job of creating a world that seems unto itself; at times it feels as if Harper is trapped in a maze like she’s in “The Shining,” even in broad daylight.”
-Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun Times – 3/4
“There isn’t really an argument here, and what looks like feminism is more like mansplaining.”
-A.O.Scott, New York Times
“A visually gorgeous, heady, deeply unsettling horror film.”
-Michael O’Sullivan, Washington Post – 3/4
“Men is ultimately about as deep as its title, a swipe at the multi-faceted terribleness of its titular subject that rarely gets beyond being a mere catalogue of the different ways that guys can be irritating around and dangerous toward women.”
-Keith Watson, Slant Magazine – 2/4
“Men is infuriatingly incomplete, as if Garland was so fixated on bouncing ideas around that he couldn’t be bothered to make any of them stick.”
-Richard Whittaker, Austin Chronicle
“The unsettling feeling it gives off resonates just as deeply as the unanswered questions it leaves behind. It’s a mood piece, and that mood is dreadful.”
-Adam Graham, Detroit News – C+
The reviews so far have been leaning towards positive, though they are not as high in reception as Garland’s previous films. Men seems like a niche horror film which only something like A24 can put out and might have limited appeal confined to a certain section of audience who crave for some variety in the genre of horror.
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