EAn uglier film about mucus, blood and chlorophyll can hardly be imagined, let alone filmed. But not a nicer one either. Whenever your eyes want to tear away while watching, a bewitched image captures you again in Alex Garland’s “Men”. You want to continue seeing what you could never have imagined. As befits art, this film has the greatest respect for that which is not art, nature: echoes compose in the idiom of a minimalism that whistles trickier than anything by Terry Riley, birds mock psychoanalytically, forests are made of Differences in elevation – at the top of the hill, which can only be climbed if you take the trouble to pull yourself up by spooky black roots, you can look down at treetops.
Blue pools of sage form in the grass, suddenly there’s a naked bald guy with horrible facial injuries between moss-stained ruins. That’s not human. If he could speak, he would have to say something like: The nature that sends me is not half as dangerous for you humans as the civilization you have built, and even the hardest hailstorm is but a kiss on the cheek compared to the pangs of separation you experience each other at the end of each of your civil bonds.
Jessie Buckley plays Harper Marlowe, a successful, metropolitan, urban, thirty-something English woman whose husband (Paapa Essiedu) killed himself in front of her. She flees to the countryside to process the trauma. Memories of the emotional blackmailer, cut into the film as bone-chilling flashbacks, torment her incessantly. While the deceased wasn’t hard to read — she told him the truth to his face: “If you threaten me because I want a divorce, that’s exactly why we should get a divorce” — but what about the bereaved can’t get rid of are two seconds during which he looked her straight in the face through the window as he fell off the roof. Was that so, or is she just imagining it? Is such a view possible, do the light conditions allow it, the eyes, the souls?
The caretaker of the property she rented to sort herself there would never understand such questions. He’s a bulbous slob who keeps saying woody things like “Herrje” and “Firlefanz” in the highly plausible German dubbed version, a funny character between Loriot and Monty Python, then soon a few level registers below, in the direction of Didi Hallervorden or Diether Krebs in ” sketchup”.
Rory Kinnear, the highly controlled exceptional actor, who not only embodies this Geoffrey, but almost all male characters in “Men”, sets accents in the crudest dialects of comedy, yes: slapstick, to lull the audience into a false sense of security, as a countryman , priest, innkeeper or policeman. And then he appears again, transformed, as the already mentioned homeless, stark naked bald head. No registration office knows where he comes from, but the worms and crawlers in the floors of all churches and cemeteries know it: This is the “green man”, documented in art history from ancient Iphigenia columns to the French onesleaf heads to ancient roof decorations in Lebanon, related to both Satan and the great goat god Pan, masculine counterparts to the expressively gendered femininity of figures such as the so-called Sheela-na-gig images, which can be interpreted both as a celebration and as a distorted fearful image of motherhood . “Men” shows both the mythical masculinity and its feminine counterpoint, both in stone and, horribly, in flesh.