What does 'Men' want?

Alex Garland's (Annihilation, Ex-Machina) Men is a 2022 folk horror movie that tells the story of Harper, played by Jessie Buckley (Fargo, I'm Thinking of Ending Things,) who takes a vacation to the English countryside after the death of her estranged husband, James (Paapa Essiedu), and is stalked and tormented by the men of the nearby village, all played by Rory Kinnear (Our Flag Means Death, Black Mirror.)

This premise sounds (despite the uncanny valley cavalcade of Kinnears) fairly straightforward for a horror movie. However, the movie takes its tight runtime and packs tension to the breaking point before a climax that's as unexpected as it is divisive.

Men provides a lot of what it promises: all the different ways men can torment women, apparently without even realizing it. It manages this without feeling too heavy-handed in its execution. There is no winking at the camera every time Harper experiences a microaggression at the hand of a new, differently incompetent Kinnear. It just happens and we're left to contemplate it. These small moments form the framework for the movie but it doesn't really arrive at the point of the movie.

Yes, Harper endures gaslighting. Her boundaries are trampled, her concerns are dismissed and she is turned into someone she's not by Male Fantasy. She's sworn at and asked invasive questions about her marital status and she bears it with stoicism.

But Men isn't just about women and how they deal with the things they endure every day. It's also about men. It's about harm and love.

In the climactic sequence of Men, Harper fights back against her tormentors, but a huge amount of their damage is self-inflicted. From the opening scene, in which Harper's husband berates her and tells her that she's killing him by simply wanting to get away from him, the movie has made it clear what forms the bloody, beating heart of the film: the harm men do to themselves, and who they expect to shoulder the blame.

This harm is wired into the very being of the men experiencing it -- all of the wounds that are inflicted on any given man in the sequence (the Green Man's ruined arm, the vicar's stabbed side, Geoffrey's broken leg) carry over to every other man in the sequence until it all culminates in the actual man who is actually tormenting Harper: her husband James, who fell or jumped to his death after Harper told him she wanted a divorce.

In the final few minutes of the movie, we watch Rory Kinnear birth Rory Kinnear over and over again, each one bearing the wounds of the previous one as if to say every generation of man bears the wounds of the prior man. "You really hurt me," a little boy scoffs, despite Harper never doing any harm to him directly. Because he's just the same as the rest. She hurt one of them so she hurt all of them.

They are harmed, but not directly, and when they are harmed, they blame a woman they've been terrorizing. The film speculates that, to men, not getting what they want, no matter what they've done in the interim, is more destructive than knife wounds or broken bones.

James wants Harper's love. The men of the village don't seem to want anything concrete from her (with the exception of the vicar, who has a sexual interest, and one of the most expertly on-the-nose lines in recent memory: "I have decided you are an expert at carnality," he says) but they batter themselves against the rocks of Harper's indifference, fear and rage trying to extract what they can from her, faulting her for not giving it to them, whatever 'it' is.

Men uses pagan imagery like The Green Man -- a symbol of renewal and change that was shifted by the Christian rule into a symbol of lust and sin -- to represent what haunts Harper. The Green Man has long been used as an ill-omen and he stalks Harper throughout the film, a clear representation of the grief over her husband she's sublimating, growing wilder and less human every time it appears, as Harper's own emotional state grows wilder to match.

The "birthing" sequence is divisive: some people think it's too hard of a left turn from a movie that primarily relies on quiet tension. Some people find it too gratuitous. These are all subjective opinions, but to me, this sequence is the movie.

It's a scene that goes on as long as it has to for the viscerally terrifying act of one Rory Kinnear being shed like a skin-suit for another Rory Kinnear to turn into some mundane and unremarkable. The worst thing you've ever seen quickly becomes routine, uninteresting.

Because the terror that men inflict on women has become mundane, it has become unremarkable. Women watch men destroy themselves over and over again without consideration for the person they're forcing to shoulder the blame for their existential self-harm.

As we pull away from the big picture, the final line digs right in. Hearing it, you might realize that the whole film really exists in those first few minutes, in that orange-tinted memory that torments Harper. James emotionally tortures his wife, reducing her to a begging, shouting mess until he finally assaults her and kills himself (whether intentionally or accidentally, Harper does not know or seem to want to think about) the crux of the movie is clear: his ankle snapped, his arm split open by iron bars, his insides torn to shreds…all of that was self-inflicted, but to him, Harper did it.

Look what she made him do, it seems like they all say. (And the vicar does say quite literally.)

The emotional torture she endures? Her fault. The physical damage the men take as she scrambles to defend herself? Her fault. She cannot get away from them by asking them to leave her alone, because that hurts them. She cannot fight back, because that hurts them. And to hurt one of them is to hurt all of them. And that makes her the bad guy.

This is not singular to strange men, abusive men or old men. It's children, it's bumbling landlords and handsome young husbands and men of the cloth. It's not this man, specifically, it's all men, always.

"What do you want from me, James?" Harper asks.

"Your love," the specter of her husband says.

Isn't it easier, the movie seems to taunt you with, to just give him that love? Just easier to play hide and seek with a bratty boy? Just easier to let him call you Mrs.? Isn't it easier to just give in to the men who seek to take and take when all fighting back does is hurt? Isn't it just easier for a woman to give in to what men want of her? But fighting back is all Harper has.

Men asks the question of what do these men want? And it answers "love."

But then leaves you with one last question: after you, man, have torn yourself apart for love, for attention, for sex -- after you've battered yourself against the shore of someone's indifference to the point of irreparable hurt and harm…is there even anything left of you worth loving?