In short: Men (2022)

If you want, you can certainly read this pretty feminist horror film by Alex Garland as a very on the nose and thereby much too blunt “all men/Rory Kinnears are evil” sort of affair. That reading of the film certainly is in the tale of a Harper - often brilliantly portrayed by Jessie Buckley, adding emotional nuance even in scenes where simply gaping at the weirdness would be perfectly sensible as an acting decision - fleeing the remains of a terrible relationship and the death that ended it to a quiet country cottage where she inadvertently steps into the weird. Which, apparently, is a place where all men, even creepy little boys, are played by Rory Kinnear.

However, there are a lot of other thing going on here as well that point away from the blandness of allegory and the sort of metaphor that can only have one meaning like a stupid crossword puzzle, into a truer and freer weirdness. This weirdness is still interested in the obvious thematic core concerns, making the sort of shitty exchanges with shitty men they probably expected better from many women have to go through much too regularly additionally disquieting in ways they wouldn’t be in the real world, and which make normal exit strategies from these situations barely even thinkable.

There seems to be a whole realm of spiritual and existential horror floating just out of Harper’s line of sight at first, only to be pushed into the foreground more and more. Old bad myths out of the realm of folk horror – in particular a very strange reading of the Green Man - want to take control of Harper’s life in ways very similar to how her relationship to her husband ended up, with anger, helplessness and inversions of ideas of fertility pushing and pulling at reality. The Old Ways as a very different kind of nightmare than usual in folk horror, realized by Garland in often striking and hypnotic pictures that are often much more than just weird for the metaphor’s sake.