A recently widowed woman leaves for a quiet English town, hoping to recover. But the grief of loss cannot be compared to what she will have to endure when someone or something from the surrounding forests begins to pursue her. Watch full movie Men 2022 FlixTor online in HD.
Harper retreats alone to the beautiful English countryside in the aftermath of a personal tragedy, hoping to find a place to heal. However, it appears that someone or something from the surrounding woods is following her. What begins as a simmering dread transforms into a fully formed nightmare inhabited by her darkest memories and fears.
A life-changing traumatic event for Jessie Buckley’s Harper jolts with an eerie love song synced up with a shellshocked facial reaction in a startling opening that sets Alex Garland’s Men’s anxiety-fueled and paranoid tone throughout. Rob Hardy’s cinematography is also filtered through an orange hue, possibly representing the ominous uncertainty and danger she appears to live with every day.
While the English countryside she visits and rents out as part of a healing process is captured with vast space, blue flower beds, a comforting manor, and the filmmaker’s usual hypnotic visual freakouts, it’s the sound design, above all, that gets under the skin here. Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury’s score is effectively creepy, but simple concepts like sound travelling and echoing across a tunnel create something uniquely unsettling.
Men, like Alex Garland’s debut and sophomore features, is a cerebral exercise that requires viewer interpretation in addition to researching a plethora of images here that appear to be inspired by folklore (get ready to Google things like “naked man four-leaf clover meaning”). However, this is a fairly straightforward home invasion thriller with rising suspense that quickly becomes claustrophobic and suffocating as every pushback feels futile.
In some ways, this is a benefit, because once the film gets going, it’s a freight train of tension and shocking imagery, but some aspects of the exposition feel slightly undercooked (though it’s always possible that more will reveal itself on rewatches, which I highly recommend).
Harper is shown around the lavish countryside home by its caretaker, an upbeat and offbeat Rory Kinnear, who later plays multiple roles in Men. And if you’re already fuming over Alex Garland’s decision to make a film about the many ways men can be trash, don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out. This is also the aspect that is the most psychologically twisted, giving viewers plenty to think about.
Harper is recovering from a failed marriage, with many scenes involving various Rory Kinnears potentially doubling as a guilt-tripped conscience living in her head. Regardless, the threats she faces are real, ranging from a naked stalker covered in moss to a small police unit that doesn’t seem to take the intrusion seriously, a vicar who is quick to blame, and a young man eager to play hide and seek who resorts to blatantly misogynistic insults when denied. There’s also Alex Garland’s take on the new Zoom in trope (Gayle Rankin), which could have been cut even if it plays out unexpectedly.
Even Harper, who has been through a great tragedy, retains a level of naivety, openly assuming that she will be safe and that the police will know what they are doing when they arrest the naked intruder. It is a subtle indictment of how these services, particularly for women, fail. Each of these men also pushes Harper into various forms of harassment, whether verbal, sexual, or violent, forcing Harper to defend herself with whatever weapons are available.
This leads to an ultimate hypnotic “what the everloving fuck am I watching” finale that is mesmerising, jaw-dropping, and as thematically ambiguous as Annihilation’s climax. Alex Garland’s point appears to be, in addition to making a statement about love at the end, how multiple personalities can reside inside men, with an unfortunate number of them being deceptive and gross. There aren’t enough superlatives to accurately describe how arresting it all is, even if you’re sitting there flabbergasted, knocked on your ass, and disgusted.
It’s also worth noting that, as talented as Alex Garland is as a filmmaker, none of this would be possible without Jessie Buckley and Rory Kinnear fully committing to this vision. While Rory Kinnear undoubtedly has the more flashy performance, Jessie Buckley gives a brilliantly tormented performance that conveys how the sins and trauma inflicted by man (or men) haunt forever like a spectre.