Men review — Jessie Buckley stars in a man’s-eye view of violent misogyny

Alex Garland’s Men is a terrible date movie. The stuff of the story — violent misogyny in a stylised package — will be a poor fit for an evening of romance. While you might both agree that Jessie Buckley is excellent as heroine Harper, slippery handling of volatile themes is a recipe for rows over dinner. In fact, to watch Men at all is to mimic a Tinder catastrophe. At first you will brim with intrigue. Then will come a sinking feeling. An escape through the bathroom window may seem extremely tempting.

Garland starts promisingly. He is a gifted writer-director, and you can tell he does a great pitch. His early career script for Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) wowed with a first-act vision of London emptied by viral pandemic. The city features here too, though only in flashbacks to trauma. Instead we are in an English Arcadia, a West Country manor house Harper rents as sanctuary.

So far, so Garland. His sleek sci-fi Ex Machina took place in another scenic pile, where man sought to master machine. Here the tech issue is dicey WiFi, tucked into the pocket of the plot. Still landlord-manager Geoffrey is sweetness and light, well-bred in waxed Barbour. He is played by Rory Kinnear. “A very specific type,” Harper says later. She isn’t wrong. With pinpoint observation and a shimmer of menace, for now the film makes a fine Pied Piper.

So to a walk in the woods. Better yet than the opening, Garland conjures a rhapsodic sequence in a green fantasia. Brilliantly, the film deploys Buckley’s talent as a singer, the scene fusing fairytale, a trace of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker and a one-woman choral round. Honestly, just cut the other 95 minutes and release it as a short.

Because your bad night out starts here. The mood is soon disturbed by a naked figure, odd even for the English countryside. A spoiler warning is due here. Look close and the nude is again Kinnear. But this is not the hapless Geoffrey. Instead, both characters are just the first in a gallery of awful men played by the same actor. Smug copper, nasty schoolboy, pervert vicar and others follow, belittling and tormenting Harper. What gravity the film aims for is foiled by how tickled it is by the casting, treated as a wheeze with joke-shop teeth.

From here, we plummet into bloody, psychotronic guff. Screen and story fill with forbidden apples and folk horror trappings familiar from modish backers A24. Are these actual jumbo clichés, or ironic spins on jumbo clichés? Who knows? Not me — and, you suspect, not Garland, who flings around ideas while offering a female perspective of abuse from somewhere other than first hand.

After Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, Men is the second recent British film in which a successful male director has shared less than coherent thoughts on the mistreatment of women. The confusing thing is that Garland already made a knockout film about toxic manhood in the spare, unsparing Ex Machina. Now he returns to diminished effect in a film packed with magpied borrowings from Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Danish provocateur Lars von Trier.

Congratulations to those men, as American actress Issa Rae remarked, announcing an all-male director shortlist for the 2020 Oscars. The top team here is just as single-sex, from Garland through three credited producers to Daniel Katz, chair of A24. For all the implied mea culpa, would a woman have made a film about misogyny that strayed this far into silly wig-out? Or been funded to direct one so gratingly literal-minded? Questions, questions. Spare yourself the trouble and tell the film-makers you’re busy. The text writes itself. It’s not you, it’s Men.

★★☆☆☆

In UK and US cinemas now