Critic Reviews

It’s the sort of film that rattles you in three ways at once: through the grim candour of its themes, the chill precision of its craft, and the nightmarish throb of its images.

Garland’s bold, original version of what horror can be when it swaps tired old tropes for visceral, visionary thrills is an absolute game-changer.

Women, men, relationships, the patriarchy feminism, nature, and body-horror merge in writer/director Alex Garland’s creepy, allegorical art-house horror thriller Men.

To put it in a way the kids do: Men is vibes.

Garland is a master at ratcheting tension to an almost unbearable degree, and he flexes that muscle hard in Men. The way he gradually presses the acceleration pedal, allowing the narrative to gather momentum until it almost implodes in its final third, is really quite remarkable.

A horror meditation on the biblical origins and self-perpetuating permutations of patriarchy, Men unfolds like an echoing primal scream.

Men is nearly unique as a horror movie in Harper’s specific response to the threats she faces. But even as she parts ways with the usual wailing victim image, the film still holds onto its sense of the uncanny and horrific. Even seasoned body-horror fans may be shaken by where this film goes in terms of its bloody physicality.

The fact that the outcome is wide open to different interpretations makes Men a more ambiguous work than Garland’s sci-fi horror hybrids, Ex Machina and Annihilation. It’s also more menacing and viscerally creepy.

A glib misreading of Men might reduce it to: "Ha! Men! They're all alike." But the film's ending emphasises how much Harper's trials and Garland's film have been about her profound tangle of love, grief and understanding.

Garland, having dipped with his interesting-but-flawed puzzler Annihilation, returns to the form of the excellent Ex Machina here with a shocking, hilarious and terrifying take on grief and masculinity at its most toxic. Thrilling stuff.