Men (2022)
Well, this was a tasty morsel. A slow-burn meditation on what it’s like to be a woman in the modern world, “Men” follows a widow named Harper – played by Jesse Buckley – who seeks respite in the English country-side after the chilling, graphic death of her husband. Instead of calm and healing, she’s condescended-to, harassed and threatened by the male citizenry of the charming-turned-harrowing hamlet she’s staying in, all of whom – even when it’s a child – are portrayed by actor Rory Kinnear.
Odd set-up and simple for sure. But it’s enticing, like a good mystery should be.
For the most part, Harper’s trauma is unveiled in smash-cut snippets to red-hued flashbacks of the argument Harper had with her husband right before his death. The scenes are jarring – emotionally spikey with a setting-sun eerieness that sharply contrasts the cool grays and lush greens of the English countryside.
But this thing is also ripe with subtle-as-a-jackhammer metaphor – like the apple Harper plucks from the tree at the beginning. I found that most of it really pays off as the film makes its point. The nature of patriarchal society to slap women with the blame for so much, including original sin itself, is in life merciless and obvious, and this movie is interested much more in driving home this central point than it is in simply telling a story.
It’s not a movie built for literal audiences. It’s too dense, slow, thoughtful and then, in its final thirty minutes, violent and – honestly – gross, for most people to want to work through.
But I liked it. A lot. I really love the pacing of the thing, the way the slow movements ratchet-up the tension in quiet-yet-formidable ways. Writer/director Alex Garland, working with his usual director of photography, Rob Hardy, stages everything with a center focus on lead character Harper. The world surrounding her is often blurry, or unfocused, a trace of vignetting teasing at the edges of her reality which makes he seem both small and crowded-upon by the setting. The English country house Harper stays in is meticulously appointed, but the ceilings are low and the rooms seem to almost close in around Harper, much the way the tunnel in the woods does early in the film.
That tunnel sequence is a real stand-out. Harper stands at one end of a long tunnel under a large railroad bridge and creates a kind of echoing song with little shouts into it that seem to go on for an unnaturally long time. After listening and adding to her echos with new bits of sound and melody, she stops walking into the tunnel when she sees someone standing at the other end suddenly. A naked man. The man lets out a frightening, feral-sounding bark, so she turns away and then he moves in pursuit of her. She runs hard to get away from him, the sound of his barking adding to her fear. Incredible use of imagery and sound in this sequence and I positively ADORE how it’s brought back later in the sequence where Harper is trying to escape the house over and over again, unable to escape Men.
I feel like we could go hours on the central topic of the film, the idea that even in grief, a woman cannot just BE, but instead must play courteous and kind to the men all around her. She is not allowed to be annoyed or a bitch or cruel or justified. She must at all times be subservient and play her docile part in the day-to-day of all the men around her.
The thing that’ll trip up a lot of people will initially be the roles Rory Kinnear plays here. As mentioned previously, this British actor best known for work done in the Daniel Craig Bond movies and his prominent role in the Showtime series “Penny Dreadful.” Here Alex Garland takes a huge risk, casting Kinnear as the kind, awkward caretaker of the country house Harper stays at, but also as the threatening naked stalker she first sees at the tunnel. But we don’t stop there. In fact, Kinnear also plays a creepy and grabby Vicar as well as a little foul-mouthed kid. And if that weren’t enough, in one scene he plays the barkeep, a cop and two quiet, but threatening looking thugs in the local tavern. In fact, Kinnear plays every male part except that of John, Harper’s husband who is an African-British man. And since everything in this movie feels very deliberate, I do wonder what Garland intended by having a mixed-race couple at the heart of this film, but I’ve got no guesses there beyond “male dominance knows no color.”
Indeed, despite John being played with intense vulnerability and powderkeg passion by Paapa Essidu, all men are the same in this movie, regardless of what they look like. Whether it’s Kinnear or Essidu, they hang their needs on Harper who wants nothing to do with any of it. Buckley, for her part, has an incredibly huge challenge of shouldering this film and expressing both huge strength and weakness simultaneously. She’s a victim who is so. very. TIRED. of being a victim and BY GOD, she just wants to heal and live BUT THE MEN WON’T LET HER. Buckley’s fantastic here – nondescript in her features and as far as personal details go, she’s representing all women and does so with incredible skill. Garland doesn’t really give her a person so much as an idea to flesh out. She’s woman. And oh she’s going to roar.
Of course, no discussion of this film can ignore the finale which is… wild and let me just say, kudos to you, Mike for choosing “Bottom Five Transformations” for this episode. THe end of Men is gory and bordering on ridiculous, but it worked well enough for me.
Essentially, what happens is Harper is attacked by several of the Men from town one-by-one, in increasingly bizarre and apparently supernatural ways. The stalker, apparently called “The Green Man” and a symbol of growth after grieving, steadily has evolved over the course of the movie into a scarred, bleeding mess with leaves inserted into his various lacerations. He attempts to get into the house after Harper locks herself inside and when he reaches his hand into the mail slot, she plunges the kitchen knife she frantically grabbed earlier clear through his forearm. He doesn’t scream, instead slowly pulling his hand back from the slot which the knife slices through all the way down to his fingers.
The next time she sees him, he’s no longer the stalker, but now he’s the child from earlier who called Harper all sorts of nasty names. He too has the horrible injury to his arm and hand. And so with each incarnation that visits and threatens her.
Then the crazy really gets uncorked and we’re treated to a sequence where each of Kinnear’s Men birth another through various vaginal openings that appear on their bodies, culminating with the breach birth – from the mouth – of James, Harpers husband who died from a fall with an injury that was very similar to that of the torn-up arm. It’s a sequence I’ll never forget, and the execution is JUST artful enough that the heavy-handedness of the metaphor succeeds. Men beget men beget men and we end where we began, with Harper facing James and telling her, we’re done here. You’re not hanging this painful shit on me anymore.
Garland is a hell of a filmmaker. With Ex Machina, he gave us an excellent mediation on what it means to be human and what it might mean to be a machine created by humans. With Annihilation, he offered a fantastical, frightening and chilling meditation on the soullessness and beauty of cancerous replication. And in Men, he offers a much more straightforward theme – that the patriarchy is horrifying – in a scary and surreal fashion. These movies do feel like the work of the same artists, particularly Annihilation and Men which share a kind of dreamlike non-reality that’s only hinted-at in Ex Machina. I like the spaces in which he dwells and I often like where he ends up, although Annihilation’s ending took me longer to warm to.
With Men, I see the movie’s final moments – with Harper discovered sitting outside the house, signs of chaos everywhere, by her pregnant best friend, as a sign that she’s crossed out of the stages of grief and entered a level of acceptance. Harper smiles a bit because she’s found the sense of peace she’d been looking for and her grieving was this arduous bloodbath, now ended. Men have tried to get what they want from her, but Harper – and indeed her friend and perhaps the unborn child in her friend’s belly – are done with being what’s expected of them. No matter how fucked-up everything gets, they’re going to fight and win.
Bottom Five Transformations:
Evil Dead into Evil Dead 2 (1981 and 1986 respectively)
dir. Sam Raimi
A choice made by a very furious 14 year-old me.
I loved the original Evil Dead when I was a kid. It scared the bejesus out of me! So many terrifying and memorable moments scarred me that I pretty much completely missed the comedy of the film. Thus its abrupt end and use of the upbeat Charleston swing song sort of shocked me, but I figured it was just Sam Raimi in the guise of the deadites telling us “Hey! They’re all dead and it’s time to party!” With so much unrelenting gore and jump scares, the original Evil Dead despite the limits of its budget, seemed Hell-bent on giving viewers nightmares. And when it was announced that Evil Dead II was coming out in 1986, I was eager for more terror. What I got was… Three-Stooges-like slapstick comedy, way less scares, and instead of a continuation of the first movie’s story, essentially a beat-by-beat rehash of everything we’d already seen. In fact, Raimi even went as far as re-doing many key scenes from the first movie now that he had the deeper pockets of Dino DeLaurentiis. I was furious! I hated Evil Dead II and it held the prize for most disappointing sequel until I saw Alien 3 in ’92. Of course, over the years, and with the release of Army of Darkness, I came to appreciate Evil Dead II for the comedic insanity it presents. But man, you wanna talk bottom five transformations? I have to include the time when one of my favorite horror movies was transformed into a goddamn goof.
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005)
dir. George Lucas
Anakin into Dark Vader
I mean, do I have to really say anything about the prequel trilogy other than “Noooooooooooooooo!” After slogging through three overly-plotted and over-long CGI-choked movies about the genesis of the biggest baddest meanie in all of Star Wars, we get a charred-up Anakin on an operating table surrounded by goofy-ass robots that snap all of the iconic pieces into place. And here we are, finally, about to give rise to THE Darth fucking Vader and we get… “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!” With arms up in the air like he was watching the Sith soccer club lose to Real Madrid, Vader’s first moment as Vader was mourning, in the most silly way possible, the death of Padme Amidala. This one makes the list for just the shear magnitude of its failure.
The Santa Clause (1994)
dir. John Pasquin
Tim Allen turns into St. Nick.
Am I the only one who finds the whole idea behind The Santa Clause dark as fuck? Like, the way Santa has been immortal all these millenia are… because he dies and then someone else just puts on the suit AND BECOMES HIM? It’s like the Jolly Ol’ Saint Nick’s Night of the Creeps. And the physical transformation Tim Allen’s character makes is pretty alarming. He puts on a ton of weight, cannot say no to sweets and cannot shave off his new white beard as it’ll immediately grow back! Plus, just by looking at children, he now knows if they’re naughty or nice? But perhaps the biggest indignity is that Allen’s character Scott, out of the now ever-present and limitless goodness of his heart, restores a belief in Santa Clause for his ex-wife and her new shrink husband by giving them the childhood gifts they didn’t get as kids which led to them not believing in Santa Claus. What a load of crap! And also? Santa DIES at the beginning of this and we watch as the parasitic, magical nature of Kris Kringle devours Scott’s life until he’s fucking arrested and is broken out of prison by elves! Good lord, if this isn’t a terrible transformation, I don’t know what is!
The Breakfast Club (1985)
dir. John Hughes
Allison’s makeover by Claire to win over a jock
I think we recently discussed this – possibly during our Glen or Glenda episode? But this was such a tone deaf move in an otherwise smart and well-handled treatment of teen life. When Claire turns gothy outcast Allison into an allegedly appropriate-looking girl for a jock to like, I felt a little piece of me die. Dandruff aside, Claire was quirky and super attractive as she was, and post-transformation, she was milquetoast, a dime-a-dozen gal in pastels with boring hair. Yeah, we shouldn’t judge Claire on how she looks, but we also shouldn’t applaud her being forced into acceptability by society. If anything, Brian should have earned a shot at Claire because he would have accepted her as she was. Even Ally Sheedy herself said of the final form of Claire, “I never liked the makeover. Listen, it was Hollywood in the Eighties. They wanted to take the ugly duckling and make her into a swan. As far as I was concerned, that wasn’t what I was doing with that character, but that was what they wanted.” Both Sheedy and Molly Ringwald, who played Claire, tried to get writer/director John Hughes to change the ending, having Claire instead take off the layers she was hiding under, but he held firm and, well, we get what we get, which is number three on my list of bottom five transformations.
Terminator 2: Judgement Day
dir. James Cameron
T-800 goes from killing machine to a dad.
You and I have argued about T2 pretty much for the entirety of our twenty-year friendship. And you’re still wrong when you say T2 is a good movie. But we’re not here to discuss that right now. Instead, let’s discuss how writer/director James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger created the most convincing, unstoppable killing machine ever committed to film in The Terminator and then… turned it into a joke-quipping, dear-old-dad to the horrendously awful Eddie Furlong’s John Connor. From one movie to the next, the change in Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor from crying, screechy damsel in distress to bad-ass warrior are what earns the most ink, but for me the transformation of the T-800 is what I’ll always remember most about the movie. Roll the clip where Hamilton waxes on about the T-800 being a better father than any John could have had. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tksN5Jaan9E It’s a painfully awful moment in a movie that trades-in the horror and terror of the original for… a fucking thumbs up at the end as the T-800 sinks into lava. Fuck T2. It’s ridden the nostalgia train for way too long and lived-on as a gem in the hearts of grown-ass people who should understand that 1) Robert Patrick is easily the best part about it and 2) Terminator 3 did exactly the correct thing in boldly retconning the whole fucking ending.