film notes: men

It's incredibly rare that a horror movie will invoke the feeling of "what the fuck did I just watch?" but I started watching The Men a couple weeks back, and I actually paused it about 20 minutes in. Mostly since I was looking for a bit lighter fare as I was eating my dinner that night (the opening scene begins with a high-rise suicide of the protagonist's estranged husband, so it seemed a little more than I was looking for). I knew it might be an odd one, it was an A24 release after all, who has brought us the strangeness of movies like Climax and Midsommar, and, in fact, I had seen the preview in the theater last spring before the genius Everything Everywhere All At Once, itself a strange little movie. But I returned to it a couple nights ago to find this one far weirder and disorienting than I expected and yet somehow also really good.

The plot follows the widowed woman, released from an abusive marriage and seeking respite in a rural cottage. There, she encounters several men, pretty much all threatening (and portrayed by one actor) which grow steadily more disturbing and bloody, leading to one of the most surreal and strange finales I have ever seen in a horror film.  While I was left thinking "what?" on further reading and thinking I shook off my confusion and began to understand what the movie was trying to do.

There has been much discussion of folk horror of late, not exactly a new subgenre, but one that has been proliferating in recent years, particularly feminist folk horror. Folk horror is that which draws its terrors from the natural world and the human place within it. Think shadowy forests and churning oceans. Think rot seeping through idyllic rural or wooded landscapes, cults, witches, and legends.  The Witch, of course, is a great example, as is the sun-drenched world of Midsommar. Or older movies like the Wicker Man, Phenomena, or The Woods. Or of course, Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Men begins with Garden of Eden metaphors and a joyous walk through the woods that becomes terror-filled after a naked man, who slowly turns into a wrathful pagan Pan-like figure begins to stalk the main character. She is also terrorized by an angry young boy (super freaky through CGI), a priest who blames her for her husband's suicide, and a "nice" landlord who proves to be anything but.  The slow creep dread of the first half descends to a quickly paced and steadily bloody and horrific. There were moments that made me angry, moments that kind of made me nauseous. Others that elicited an "ew!"  Moments that made me cheer as the main character fought back with knives and axes and eventually, as it all kept coming, gave in to resignation. Because, of course, it all keeps coming, a fact as women, we all know.