Film Review: Jessie Buckley in superb form as a woman struggling to keep a lid on it all in Men

Jessie Buckley stars in Men

★★★★☆

There is a moment of sly misdirection near the beginning of Men (16s), when Harper (Jessie Buckley) plucks a ‘forbidden’ apple from a tree as she arrives at the Hertfordshire country retreat she has booked for some rest and recuperation. Harper is no Eve seeking knowledge, however; in trying to suppress her memories, she is a woman straight out of Greek myth, consumed by guilt and pursued by Furies. 

When Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear), her plummy-toned host, enquires where Harper’s husband is, we learn via flashback that James (Paapa Essiedu) has died in violent circumstances — but while Harper can flee from London and the apartment where James died, she can’t escape from the nightmare his death has caused.

Written and directed by Alex Garland, Men is on one level a psychological horror in which the heroine finds herself confronted by a series of increasingly bizarre men in the quiet country village where she has sought refuge, with the tension ratcheting up every time Harper encounters another weirdo.

Men is written and directed by Alex Garland

On another, and arguably more important, level, the film operates as a kind of Jungian fever-dream, one chock-a-block with imagery and experiences drawn from folktale and mythology: it’s not just the men that Harper meets — among them a policeman, a vicar and naked stalker — but the world itself (and especially the natural world) that poses a threat.

Jessie Buckley is in superb form here as a woman struggling to keep a lid on a simmering psychosis, and there’s strong support from Rory Kinnear, who manages to be creepily sinister in a variety of roles. The latter stages push the concept a little too far to be fully credible, but Men is a film that will linger long in the memory.

(cinema release)