Critics reviews

A brilliant technical exercise in horror... Men is a hallucinatory provocative work which will provoke laughs and yelps and not a little self-reckoning.

Lent emotional heft by Jessie Buckley... [Men] is a playfully twisted affair – not quite as profound as it seems to think, perhaps, but boasting enough squishy metaphorical slime to ensure that its musings upon textbook male characteristics are rarely dull, and sometimes deliciously disgusting.

For all the busyness of the action and the braveness of the performances, Men does, however, have trouble locating a satisfactory route out of its weird set-up... The final half-hour of a short film descends into a sustained surrealism that invites little real risk or any chance of progression.

[An] astonishing, bloodcurdling modern-day folktale... 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] two previous directorial efforts, Ex Machina and Annihilation, showed a far more nuanced appreciation for the resilience of women than we see here... In Men, feminism is reduced to a sympathetic pat on the back for Harper, and a gesture of “isn’t it a shame?” That’s not exactly scary – just wearily familiar.

Even if you walk out of Men not knowing what to think, the movie brings you to a place where feeling overtakes thought. The shiver that comes over you may be one of recognition or melancholy or a muddle of both, as you stand at the edge of where a movie ends, blurring into real life.

This calculated exercise in menace wants so very much to subvert, confound, and disturb as it probes mutating fractures between what were once quaintly called “the sexes” that it forgets to function as a movie. And yet, Garland’s active engagement with his themes, moods, and show-stopping ick is still something to be reckoned with.

With neither the grandiosity of pagan vision that illuminated The Green Knight nor the subversive forest horror of Ben Wheatley's In the Earth, Garland's Men is never quite a joke, but maybe that would have made it a more pointed parable.

There will be viewers, no doubt, who share the violent bleakness of the movie’s outlook. Will they admire such rigor, or will they reckon, as I did, that it narrows and flattens the free movement of the drama, with dismal results? After a while, the story has nowhere to go.

As with “Annihilation” before it, the more surreal “Men” gets, the less frightening and more melancholy it becomes; it’s as if the movie were peeling back the skin of its chosen subject to reveal the diseased, writhing and frankly pitiable mess underneath. And Garland, like a coroner performing an autopsy, surveys his specimen with clinical rigor, gallows humor and the faintest hint of sorrow.

In the other movies he has directed... Garland has shown himself to be adept at intellectual genre play, embedding heady ideas about power, desire, technology and violence in tales that lean toward science fiction and horror. In “Men,” he skillfully manipulates moods and subverts expectations without achieving the unsettling, hallucinatory clarity of his best films... What looks like feminism is more like mansplaining.

Men is the most visceral and organic dive into the curse of human nature that [Garland has] made yet. But it’s like each of his movies, filling in the question of what it means to be human — and to keep living on this planet — stroke by stroke.