“Are you local?” For some people reading this, those three words will be enough to summon a deep, evil chortle. It’s one of many catchphrases from The League of Gentlemen, a sketch-based sitcom most notable in the U.S. for launching the careers of Sherlock star Mark Gatiss and regular Ben Wheatley collaborator Reece Shearsmith. But in the UK it was an era-defining comedy, its unnerving mixture of leering weirdness and folk-horror sensibilities enforced by the cast playing multiple characters, countryside stereotypes ramped up to horrifying caricatures through prosthetics and makeup.
In his third feature, Ex Machina and Annihilation director Alex Garland has inadvertently made a big-screen addition to the show, although any humor in the heavy-handed Men is completely accidental.
Like a lot of the sinister comedy of The League of Gentleman, the instigating moment is the arrival of an outsider in a less-than-idyllic village. Harper (Buckley) is fleeing London after a horrifying incident, and has rented a small mansion to recuperate and emotionally heal. However, there’s a slight problem that goes unnoticed for a while: that every man has the same face, whether it be amiable rental owner Geoffrey (Kinnear), the local vicar (Kinnear), a foul-mouthed local boy (Kinnear), a police officer (Kinnear), the bizarre naked man hiding in the woods (Kinnear) …
Garland is an undoubtedly stylish director, adept at intriguing set-pieces that are always luxuriously captured by his longtime cinematographer Rob Hardy. If Men has a moment that can equal Ex Machina‘s dance, then it’s when Harper plays a game of echoes with a seemingly endless abandoned rail tunnel. Elation at her discovery turns to fear, and a level of malice hangs over everything. But in between such moments, Men is infuriatingly incomplete, as if Garland was so fixated on bouncing ideas around that he couldn’t be bothered to make any of them stick. He introduces two key elements of medieval symbolism – the leaf-faced Green Man and the vulva-spreading sheela na gig – and misapplies them as stand-ins for the eternal conflict between men and women, and then leaves them empty of their mythic power. Much like his complete misreading of the Turing Test in Ex Machina, it’s like he misheard a concept and still folded it into his script.
There’s a point beyond which a filmmaker leaves an image up for interpretation and instead just dumps it, stripped of significance, on the audience – and Garland basically kicks these two mythical forms out of the car at speed. Style most definitely trumps substance, and there’s not even that much style here. Instead, there’s a lot of Buckley in supposedly enigmatic but actually half-formed scenes, emoting hard but not communicating much, while Garland makes a well-intentioned but ham-fisted attempt to say something about the patriarchy.
Thank goodness, then, for Rory Kinnear, who clearly understood that this could have become a trip to The League‘s Royston Vasey. Even burdened with some questionable prosthetics and one particular face-swapping effect that looks like outtakes from Aphex Twin’s “Come to Daddy” video, it’s his performance(s) that comes closest to providing some kind of coherence. Through one face on many bodies, he depicts the cavalcade of small and huge violences and impositions that men place upon women every day. Creepy, amiable, oblivious, malevolent, spiritual, carnal, abusive physically and mentally, he presents aspects of masculinity that are meant to add up to a whole. But even he has a struggle with a final act that devolves into a borderline laughable exercise in body horror. With neither the grandiosity of pagan vision that illuminated The Green Knight nor the subversive forest horror of Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth, Garland’s Men is never quite a joke, but maybe that would have made it a more pointed parable.
This article appears in Best of Austin 2022 (Insert).
