There are films I put off because I am not especially interested in them, and there are films I put off because I suspect they are going to ask for more attention than I feel like giving on an ordinary evening. Men belonged firmly to the second group. Alex Garland directing, Jessie Buckley in the lead, A24 behind it, an English country house, folk-horror imagery and Rory Kinnear apparently playing most of the male population of one village: the ingredients kept nudging it back into view whenever I passed it on a watchlist, but it also looked like something best watched when I was prepared to sit still and actually look at it.
When I finally did, the surprise was not that Men became strange. Garland has never exactly advertised himself as a supplier of uncomplicated evenings. What caught me was how patiently it gets there. For a while this is simply a film about Harper Marlowe, played by Buckley, arriving at a beautiful house in the English countryside after the death of her husband James. She wants quiet, distance and perhaps the temporary luxury of being somewhere where nobody knows what happened. The house is lovely, the garden is lovely, the lanes are lovely. Even Geoffrey, the landlord, is initially only the sort of mildly embarrassing man who makes a joke about forbidden fruit after Harper picks an apple from his tree.
Then the film begins shifting ordinary things by a few degrees. A walk becomes a pursuit. An echo becomes a warning. A priest offering comfort starts redistributing blame. A policeman turns fear into an administrative judgement. A child treats refusal as an insult. Different men keep appearing with the same face, and by the time one of those men begins giving birth to another through increasingly improbable parts of the body, I had stopped asking whether Garland intended to provide a practical explanation. The more useful question became why the nightmare keeps repeating itself.
A Country House That Pretends to Be a Sanctuary
The rented house does exactly what a good horror location should do: it first convinces me I would happily stay there. It has old timber, deep red interiors, large rooms and the slightly overgenerous proportions of a place built for people whose lives required servants and sideboards. Outside, Rob Hardy’s cinematography pushes the greens until the countryside seems almost aggressively alive. The landscape is not gloomy or dead. Quite the opposite. Everything is growing, wet, fertile and busy, which makes the later body horror feel less like an intrusion than an extension of what the film has been showing us all along.
Geoffrey fits the house. Rory Kinnear plays him as genial, fussy, a little paternal and just faintly ridiculous. He insists on carrying Harper’s bag, shows her around, makes his apple joke and seems pleased with the performance of being a proper host. Nothing he does at first is enough to make him a villain. That matters because Men would be a considerably less interesting film if every male character entered wearing a sign saying Here Comes Patriarchy. Geoffrey is more recognisable than that: a man who probably thinks of himself as helpful, with a social script inherited from somewhere behind him and never examined very closely.
The Tunnel Changes the Film
The sequence that made the film click for me is still the walk through the woods. Harper finds a disused railway tunnel and starts playing with the echo. She calls into the darkness, hears the sound return, adds another note and listens as the layers fold over one another. For a minute or two she is doing something with no defensive purpose at all. She is alone, not lonely; playful, not frightened. It is probably the freest she looks in the film.
Then a figure appears at the far end of the tunnel. At first it is small enough to be almost abstract, a human interruption inside the bright circle of the exit. When it begins moving towards her, the same acoustics that made the place enchanting become part of the threat. The film has not changed location or even introduced much new information. It has simply altered Harper’s relationship with the space. That becomes Garland’s basic trick throughout Men: the garden, church, pub, lane and house do not need to become obviously monstrous. They only need to stop feeling neutral.
The score by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow grows directly out of that idea. Voices, breath, reverberation and natural sounds are treated less as conventional accompaniment than as material the film can stretch and send back at us. Buckley’s own tunnel vocal becomes part of the musical language. The result is one of the things I liked most about the film because the sound does not merely announce danger. It makes the environment feel as though it remembers. Harper can leave London, but experience has its own acoustics. Something happens, travels outwards and returns altered.
James Leaves the Guilt Behind
For all the Green Men, church carvings and woodland menace, Men only works if James remains emotionally real. Paapa Essiedu appears in fragments because that is how Harper now has him: as memory, argument and the repeated image of his body falling past a window. Before his death, Harper had told him she wanted to leave. James responded by threatening to kill himself if she did, turning his survival into a responsibility she never agreed to carry. During their final argument he struck her. Soon afterwards he fell from the building.
The film leaves some ambiguity around the mechanics of that fall, but the emotional mechanism is much clearer. James had already told Harper that if she left and he died, she would have caused it. Whether the fall was suicide, accident, manipulation carried to a disastrous end or some mixture of all three, the guilt was planted before the body hit the ground. Death then freezes the argument at exactly the point where Harper cannot answer it. She cannot leave him more decisively than she already did, cannot make him apologise, cannot know what he intended, and cannot stop replaying the last exchange because he has made his absence feel like one final accusation.
All the Same Face, but Not the Same Man
That is why the Rory Kinnear device works better for me when I stop treating it as a riddle. Geoffrey, the policeman, Samuel, the vicar, the pub landlord, the patrons and the naked man are not identical personalities. Kinnear went in the opposite direction, building separate histories and behaviours for them so that the repeated face would not turn into a sketch-show trick. Geoffrey is paternal and ingratiating. The policeman is dismissive in the bureaucratic way of somebody who believes his judgement is more objective than Harper’s fear. Samuel is childish grievance given an adult face. The vicar is soft-spoken blame curdling into sexual menace. The naked man is something stripped of social role almost entirely.
What joins them is not that they all behave in exactly the same way. It is that each interaction eventually requires Harper to yield something: attention, trust, sympathy, obedience, emotional labour, forgiveness, fear on somebody else’s approved scale, or access to her body. The demand changes costume. The expectation beneath it remains oddly familiar. Seen that way, Kinnear’s face does not mean that all men are literally interchangeable. It makes the experience of recurrence visible.
Kinnear has said that Garland sent him the script with the instruction that he would play all the male parts, and Kinnear responded by writing biographies for each character so the makeup, costume and behaviour could grow from distinct lives rather than a collection of accents and wigs. That was the right instinct. If the performance had been based on making every incarnation grotesque, the metaphor would have flattened immediately. The disturbing part is that some of these men are pleasant until they are not, and a few probably still believe they are being reasonable while Harper’s alarm rises in front of them.
Different Uniforms for the Same Argument
The policeman is one of the film’s simplest examples. After the naked man attempts to enter the house, he is arrested, and for a moment the story seems to have returned to practical reality: an intruder was caught, the authorities are involved, there is paperwork. Then Harper learns he has been released. The officer is not theatrically cruel; he merely judges the danger differently and treats that judgement as more authoritative than Harper’s experience of it. The scene recognises something depressingly ordinary: fear often becomes negotiable the moment someone outside the situation gets to decide how frightened another person is entitled to be.
Samuel turns the same structure into a tantrum. He asks Harper to play hide-and-seek, she says no, and his mood flips almost instantly. The digital placement of Kinnear’s adult face on Zak Rothera-Oxley’s child body makes the encounter deliberately wrong before Samuel has done very much. But the behaviour is almost comic in its clarity: I asked, you refused, therefore you have injured me. The point lands because the logic is not confined to children. James gives Harper a vastly more damaging adult version of the same proposition.
The vicar is worse because he arrives wrapped in the language of care. Harper speaks to him about James and, for a moment, the church seems like another possible refuge. Then his questions start moving responsibility back towards her. Did she allow James to apologise? Could she have acted differently? Might she have pushed him towards what happened? He appears to be helping Harper examine her guilt while quietly rebuilding the exact structure that produced it. Later he becomes openly sexual and threatening, but I find the earlier scene nastier because it is still wearing the clothes of concern.
The Green Man, the Sheela-na-Gig and a Very Old Argument
The church is where Men makes its symbolic machinery most visible. Garland brings together Christian imagery, a foliate face associated with what later came to be called the Green Man, and a sheela-na-gig: one of those medieval exhibitionist carvings whose exaggerated genital display has accumulated a small library of competing explanations. Fertility is one interpretation, but not the only one, and the same is true of the Green Man. These images are useful to Garland precisely because they carry centuries of meaning without arriving with one neat translation.
Garland had reportedly been fascinated by the Green Man and sheela-na-gig imagery for years before finding a story in which to use them. I can see why. Men is full of arguments about creation, guilt and repetition, and these old stone bodies let the film place those arguments somewhere deeper than Harper’s particular marriage. The apple invokes Genesis almost too neatly; the vicar supplies Christian shame and judgement; the foliate face ties the male body to growth and regeneration; the sheela-na-gig puts an explicitly female opening into the church stone. By the end Garland has stopped hinting and turned the whole collision into anatomy.
Bodies Start Carrying Memory
The film’s most effective piece of gore for me is not the famous birth sequence. It is the arm through the letterbox. The Green Man reaches inside the house and grabs Harper. She drives a knife through his forearm, and as he pulls back the blade remains trapped against the opening, splitting the arm lengthways. I knew I was looking at an effect and still recoiled. It is slow enough for the mechanics to register, which somehow makes it worse.
More importantly, the wound does not stay with one body. It begins reappearing on the other men. The ankle injury associated with James’s fall also migrates. What the film has been doing emotionally becomes physical: one man’s damage turns up on another man, as though the bodies themselves have inherited a pattern. That is where the film’s repetition stops being merely casting and becomes anatomy. These men do not just resemble one another. They pass wounds along.
And Then the Men Start Giving Birth
There is no elegant bridge into the final birthing sequence because Garland deliberately gives up elegance. The wounded Green Man approaches Harper, changes, and gives birth to another man. That man does the same. Samuel appears, then the vicar, then Geoffrey, with each body producing the next through an increasingly grotesque parody of childbirth. The sequence is technically remarkable, disgusting, absurd and much longer than I expected. Somewhere around the third or fourth birth, my reaction changed from shock to exhaustion.
I suspect that exhaustion is part of the design. Harper changes too. She becomes less horrified as the cycle continues, almost bored by the insistence of it. The men keep arriving as though each new body must be another escalation, but the pattern has already been understood. Something that initially appears monstrous begins to look pathetic because it can only reproduce itself. Garland later spoke about rethinking this transformation material after watching Attack on Titan, and the final effect does sit in that uneasy space where grotesque anatomy tips towards the ridiculous without ceasing to be disturbing.
The symbolism is hardly shy. Masculine forms give birth to more masculine forms without women, carrying the same injuries forward and producing no genuinely new outcome. The idea is strong; whether the film needs to express it with quite so many fluids is a separate question. There was a point where I understood exactly what the sequence was doing and then had enough spare mental bandwidth to wonder which opening the next Rory Kinnear was going to emerge from. That is usually a sign that symbolism has started competing with spectacle.
James Is the One Man Who Keeps His Own Face
The cycle finally produces James, and that is the moment the film becomes simple again. After all the flesh, screaming, foliage, wounds and mythological clutter, Harper sits opposite the man she has actually been trying to get away from. He has his own face because he does not need to be another variation. The variations lead back to him.
Harper asks what he wants. His answer is her love. For me, that line does more useful work than most of the film’s mythology. All those different encounters — paternal concern, police authority, childish grievance, priestly judgement, sexual threat, primitive intrusion — collapse into a demand that sounds almost tender until you remember the cost James attached to it. Love me. Give me what I need. Make my emotional survival your responsibility.
By then Harper looks less frightened than tired. That change matters. The thing haunting her has stopped being incomprehensible. It is repetitive. James’s request has survived the marriage, his death, the countryside and an entire night of impossible bodies, but it has not become more profound through repetition. It is simply the same demand again.
Riley Arrives in the Morning
The following morning Riley arrives and finds the aftermath. She is pregnant, which is impossible to ignore after the grotesque counterfeit births of the previous night. It is tempting to make the contrast tidy: the men produce only more of themselves while Riley carries the possibility of something genuinely new. I think the film leaves enough unease around the image to resist that kind of inspirational reading. Birth is not automatically renewal. Families repeat things. Cultures repeat things. New people inherit old arrangements all the time.
Harper smiles when Riley finds her. I do not read that as a declaration that she is healed. It may mean nothing more grand than that she has survived the night and now sees the shape of what she was carrying. After a film that keeps enlarging its symbols until they become biological events, the modesty of that smile helps.
The Craft Keeps the Allegory Alive
The more I think about Men, the more I admire the people keeping its symbolism from becoming a diagram. Buckley has the least forgiving job. Kinnear gets the transformations, voices, wigs, bodies and grotesque physical business, while Buckley has to remain a recognisable person as the world stops following ordinary rules. She never plays Harper as if Harper knows she is trapped inside an allegory. Her reactions remain specific: irritation, embarrassment, fear, anger, disbelief and, eventually, fatigue.
Kinnear’s work is impressive for almost the opposite reason. He has described building biographies for the different men and feeding those ideas into costume and makeup, while Buckley has spoken about the rehearsal period as a collaborative conversation with Garland, Kinnear and Essiedu rather than a process of locking every choice in advance. That looseness seems to have helped. Geoffrey can improvise his way into being almost lovable for a few minutes; the vicar can drain warmth out of the same face; the policeman looks like the sort of man who has never once imagined himself frightening.
Hardy’s photography and Mark Digby’s production design do similar work around them. The countryside is lush rather than conventionally Gothic, while the house uses reds, wood and heavy domestic textures that grow more oppressive as Harper loses control of the space. Salisbury and Barrow’s score keeps voices and natural sound circulating through the film so that repetition is audible before it becomes anatomical. Even the final effects sequence, assembled through a mixture of practical prosthetics and visual effects, has a wet physicality that prevents the climax from becoming purely digital abstraction.
Where Men Works for Me — and Where It Starts Explaining Itself
The strongest material remains the quietest: Harper making music out of a tunnel echo, the distant figure moving towards her, the naked man standing where a person should not be standing, Samuel’s face, the vicar’s questions, the policeman’s bland dismissal and the moment another Kinnear face appears where Harper has every reason to expect somebody else. Those scenes leave enough uncertainty for me to participate. I can wonder whether the village is supernatural, whether Harper’s perception is collapsing different experiences together, whether an old thing in the landscape is wearing male forms, or whether none of those explanations is meant to cancel the others.
The film loses some of that power whenever I can label the pieces too easily. The policeman becomes institutional dismissal, the vicar becomes religious misogyny and sexual guilt, Samuel becomes entitlement, Geoffrey becomes inherited paternalism, the Green Man becomes regenerative masculinity and James becomes emotional coercion. Those readings are not wrong, but when they line up too neatly I become aware of Garland arranging his argument. Men is more frightening when I am not entirely sure what something means.
The birth sequence has the same tension. I cannot deny that it is unforgettable. It also pushes the metaphor so hard that I occasionally stopped feeling it and started admiring the engineering. Maybe that is inevitable with body horror this elaborate. Once the mechanics become astonishing enough, the viewer begins thinking about prosthetics, compositing and where Kinnear’s limbs are actually located. Horror has always had this strange double life: disgust in the foreground, craft appreciation quietly taking notes behind it.
A Horror Film That Keeps Coming Back
I ended up admiring Men more than loving it, which is probably why it has stayed in my head. A cleaner film might have been easier to like and easier to forget. Garland gives me stretches of beautifully controlled folk horror, a central metaphor that is sometimes incisive and sometimes painfully literal, one of Jessie Buckley’s most grounded performances, several Rory Kinnears I would happily avoid in real life, and a final act that appears determined to make the phrase “rebirth” physically unpleasant.
What finally holds it together is not the question of whether the men literally share a face. I no longer care much about solving that. The film is more persuasive as a story about recognition: the horrible moment when different situations begin to reveal the same emotional architecture. Harper goes to the countryside to get away from James and finds versions of his demand in hospitality, authority, childhood, religion, sexuality and even the landscape. Some arrive smiling. Some insist they are helping. Some are obviously dangerous. The face tells her — and us — that the form has changed less than it first appears.
When the repetitions have finally exhausted themselves, James is still there asking for her love. Harper hears it without the old machinery around it. Morning comes, Riley arrives, and Harper smiles. Garland does not tell me exactly what happened during the night, and by then I do not need him to. The thing that kept coming back has finally become recognisable enough to stop looking infinite.
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