Depending on where you sit, this is the culmination of everything wrong, or right, with modern "elevated" horror. We've now reached the boiling point where the allegory outweighs the plot, coming at you more as a riddle to decode than a story to get lost in. Men aims to balance several ambitions, each to varying degrees of success.
First, there's the surface level horror narrative. Taken at face value, it's merely a pedestrian home invasion story that ends with a perplexing climax. While many films are able to bury meaning within a concrete story, Men forces it's subtext to the surface. Without the metaphors, the film falls apart.
The messaging seems to be split between two themes. The main focus is the trauma surrounding a suicide. This drives the tension of the film, and provides an opportunity for some of the strongest performances. Seeing the final movement as a physical manifestation of this grief is probably the best lens to make sense of things.
Then there's the feminist allegory that catalogues male microaggressions through Rory Kinnear's tapestry of characters. Going in, I was assuming this would be the crux of the film, but it comes across a little under cooked. While a village full of similarly faced men who exhibit varying degrees of toxic masculinity had the potential to be overly on the nose, they merely dip their toes into the concept without going far enough for any truly satisfying revelations.
I struggle to make the connection between the isolated situation with Harper's husband and the macro indictment on masculinity. I know saying "not all men" has become a faux pas, but I swear, "not all men" commit suicide when you break up with them. If this is intended as just another example of male toxicity, it seems a little too extreme to be universally relatable. If it's intended to be just a trauma, isolated from the other incidents, then it eats up too much screen time and dilutes the commentary alluded to by the title.
Ultimately, it's technically well crafted, and I'll always champion something this ambitious and weird. However, for a film so openly about it's own symbolism, it feels like it stretches itself too thin to arrive at anything genuinely impactful.
First, there's the surface level horror narrative. Taken at face value, it's merely a pedestrian home invasion story that ends with a perplexing climax. While many films are able to bury meaning within a concrete story, Men forces it's subtext to the surface. Without the metaphors, the film falls apart.
The messaging seems to be split between two themes. The main focus is the trauma surrounding a suicide. This drives the tension of the film, and provides an opportunity for some of the strongest performances. Seeing the final movement as a physical manifestation of this grief is probably the best lens to make sense of things.
Then there's the feminist allegory that catalogues male microaggressions through Rory Kinnear's tapestry of characters. Going in, I was assuming this would be the crux of the film, but it comes across a little under cooked. While a village full of similarly faced men who exhibit varying degrees of toxic masculinity had the potential to be overly on the nose, they merely dip their toes into the concept without going far enough for any truly satisfying revelations.
I struggle to make the connection between the isolated situation with Harper's husband and the macro indictment on masculinity. I know saying "not all men" has become a faux pas, but I swear, "not all men" commit suicide when you break up with them. If this is intended as just another example of male toxicity, it seems a little too extreme to be universally relatable. If it's intended to be just a trauma, isolated from the other incidents, then it eats up too much screen time and dilutes the commentary alluded to by the title.
Ultimately, it's technically well crafted, and I'll always champion something this ambitious and weird. However, for a film so openly about it's own symbolism, it feels like it stretches itself too thin to arrive at anything genuinely impactful.