The phrase "elevated horror" is one I am very reluctant to use, since its meaning seems to generally land on something amorphous like "horror movies that people who think they're too good for horror movies are willing to praise". But there's definitely something there, and "elevated horror" is as good a shorthand to describe that something as anything else: a wave of movies going back to the early-middle 2010s that tell stories that necessarily put them in the horror genre, but generally move slowly, focus on character psychology, often have a clear statement to make about Society Today, and rely on stylistic flourishes more in line with art cinema than genre cinema. And whatever that something is, how broadly we define it, or what we name it, it has reached a kind of miserable apotheosis in Men, which is not the worst "elevated horror" film I have seen, but feels as though it could have been consciously designed to be a central example of the form. It's not, of course, that's not how movies get made, but it checks so many of the boxes: a blazingly clear-cut social message encoded in its ponderous one-word title; an extremely slow development from sunshiny but vaguely oppressive atmosphere to an eruption of outré violence and gore that gets called "bonkers" by people who need to watch more Italian horror films; an artfully atonal, modernist-ish score courtesy of Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury; there's a folkloric cast to the horror; A24 co-produced and is distributing the film in the United States.

As such, Men is perfectly positioned to demonstrate the limits of elevated horror, a few years into its reign: this is just not a good movie, and the things that make it not good are hand-in-hand with what "elevate" it. It's tiresome until it's incomprehensible, a lecture that slops its way into being a hallucinatory freak-out. There's probably a way of combining those two modes successfully, but it would have required writer-director Alex Garland to have started more or less from scratch. In its current incarnation, Men is trying, impossibly, to tell a story about how a woman named Harper (Jessie Buckley) is belittled, objectified, dismissed, or actively threatened by every single man she encounters (Rory Kinnear - he is, quite literally, playing every single man she encounters, outside of flashbacks), and taking this as a very literal #YesAllMen fable of the dangers of being a single woman in a swamp of toxic masculinity, while also telling a story about the stable fabric of reality slipping away from Harper as she sits in a spooky, isolated country home and sees eldritch visions. This all happens as she deals with a cocktail of feelings around the death of her abusive husband (Paapa Essiedou), with whom she locked eyes as he fell from the upstairs apartment down to a gory death on the sidewalk below.

"Every man is a genuine danger to Harper and she is right to feel under assault" and "Harper is losing her mind and can't distinguish reality from nightmare" are both perfectly solid foundations for a horror movie, but the first one specifically requires that we never believe that she's seeing things that aren't there, which is what we get in the second - perhaps it could all be tied together with the old "just because you're paranoid, that doesn't mean that aren't really out to get there" gambit, but that's not what the film is ever doing. The other gambit, the old "actually these impossible, eldritch horrors are literally real and the multi-faced Everyman-beast is a malevolent force actually hunting Harper from the old woods" is just flat-out dumb in the context of all this psychological realism, and the film's final scene implies that's actually the one it's going with, so it also could be we just have a return of Alex Garland's infamous inability to write third acts. But this third act is a complete misfire beyond anything else in his career.

Anyway, that central problem brings me back to my first point, which is that the problem with Men is the problem with elevated horror in a nutshell. This could be a pretty great horror film about the terrors of the old English woods, as seen from a London-based tourist to the countryside, finding herself first unsettled and then actively antagonised by the weird cultural ways of the country folk. That kind of folk horror about the creepiness of rural England at night is a reliable workhorse, and while there's not a whole lot that Men brings to the table that we haven't previously encountered, Garland is a skillful enough director, working with some solid collaborators (cinematographer Rob Hardy, who has shot every one of the director's films; editor Jake Roberts), that there are many individually good scenes, and at least a few individually excellent scenes.

The showpiece is a lengthy sequence that finds Harper wandering down a lane and deeper into the forest, finding a massive stone tunnel and finding to her delight that she can harmonise with her own echo to create a haunting, tuneless passage of music that comes back as a ghostly motif later in the film; and then running in a determined, focused panic after her vocalisations wake a human figure at the far end of the tunnel. It is, no reservations, a terrific suspence sequence in every respect, and to be completely fair to Men, this is the exact sort of thing that you need art house horror to make happen. It is slow and plodding; Harper singing with her echo takes up minutes of screentime, with Roberts slowly clicking between a very small number of different shots of Harper, the tunnel, and a shallow pool just inside of it rippling from the sluggish drops of water. The woods themselves have been graded to have over-saturated greens and browns, exaggerating the forest-ness of the forest in a palette that at first seems to burst with life against the grey sky and serve as a vibrant contrast to the violent orange of Harper's flashbacks to her husband's death. As the scene turns to a chase from the unseen figure, with its infrequent but frighteningly inhuman squawking call, like a massive humanoid raven, those same greens begin to feel too much, sickening and toxic and oppressive.

It's a tremendous sequence that if anything makes me even more irritated about Men, since it's proof positive that Garland and company could make a phenomenal "the English countryside, with the strange people who live there, is terrifying in all of its overwhelming nature" movie if they were inclined. But Men is too busy stacking the deck to make sure we Get It, and that having Gotten It, we Get It Some More. We could flip that around, to be fair: Men could have something probing and piercing to say about the threat men of all different sorts pose to women, emotional and physical and both and otherwise, and to really push us right into the nervous mental state of Harper as she sorts through her mixture of relief and guilt over her husband's death, while being constantly poked at by nasty little insinuations and major insults by all of the different Rory Kinnears (he is, for the record, quite excellent in an inherently gimmicky and slick (series of) role(s), and having him digitally aged-town to play a Gollum-looking schoolboy was an indefensible choice). But it's too busy trying to put over a phantasmagorical freak-out about the otherworldly embodiment of the hostile English landscape and descending into a furious third act that's indulging in some very stupid shocking! body horror imagery, and the mind-bending dilutes, or even directly contradicts, our ability to get inside Harper's head as anything other than a reactive figure being subjected to thriller mechanics.

The result is a clumsy film that manages to disguise that up to a point thanks to its gorgeous images, but has gotten too hung up on the stiff machinery of its screenwriting long before it presses the "what the hell is happening?" button and blows itself up in a chaotic mess of a finale. It's next to impossible to square any of this with the Alex Garland who last directed the much more successfully dreamy head-fuck Annihilation in 2018 (that film works where this one doesn't in large part because it starts throwing the batshit stuff at us early on, rather than dumping it out once the plot is mostly resolved). And if it can be squared with his directorial debut, Ex Machina, it's only because this amplifies everything weak or questionable about that film while jettisoning all of its strengths. It's too well-made as a visual object, with too many good thriller bits, for me to give up on the filmmaker altogether, but this is a punishing comedown, and the worst film he's ever been involved with, as director or writer.

Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.

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