Director: Alex Garland
Cast: Jessie Buckley, Rory Kinnear, Paapa Eddiedu, Gayle Rankin
Have I Seen it Before: Never.
Did I Like It: Outside of the norm, I’m writing this review after we recorded an episode of Beyond the Cabin in the Woods discussing it. We all had a measure of uncertainty about how we felt about the movie. The others leaned toward liking it, and at recording time and now I think I’m going to land on the other end of the divide.
There is some effective atmosphere on display, the performances are uniformly equal to the film surrounding them (that’s probably damning with faint praise) and there’s some authentically imaginative special effects, especially in the film’s final act.
But that’s where the problems become unavoidable for me. There’s a palpable air of misogyny streaked throughout the film, and that unflinching quality is where the film succeeds, or would have us content that its confidence is success. I can’t quite get past my read that there is an ugly vein of TERF-yness streaking across the film’s beating heart.
When Samuel is first introduced, he wears a cheap halloween mask of a female face, only to immediately push that aside and reveal the most demonstrably hateful man of all the titular men. This all culminates in the films most pointedly horrifying sequence, where all of those men proceed to give birth to each other. Is there anything more frightening to Alex Garland than people assigned male at birth beginning to take on feminine characteristics?
Is it a particularly British impulse to feel their need to not only be that hateful but express it? Probably not. Is this the only read one can have of the film? Most definitely not. But these are the thoughts I have now, even with some time away from the film.