Men First Reactions: Alex Garlands Visceral as Hell A24 Horror Film Will Make People Angry – IndieWire

Alex Garlands new film Men has screened for journalists ahead of its Cannes Film Festival Quinzaine premiere and May 20 release from A24, and first reactions are in. See a roundup below.

After directing the heady FX sci-fi series Devs, Alex Garland returns to the realm of Annihilation-esque mind-tripping horror with his latest film.

Oscar nominee Jessie Buckley stars as Harper, a young widow who has rented an isolated holiday home in the English countryside amid guilt over the death of her husband (Paapa Essiedu), an apparent suicide. Meanwhile, she cant stop seeing the face of Rory Kinnear as an innkeeper in every resident of the town and stalking her every move. What does it all mean?

While the reactions avoid spoilers, theres definitely enough here to bite on in terms of getting a sense of what Garland has in store.

Garlands MEN is a bit like Malick going from THIN RED LINE to TREE OF LIFE. Dont expect a hard sci-fi vision, just expect a vision: an intense surrealist twist on the Final Girl trope. Will lead to more questions than answers but theories will abound, IndieWires Eric Kohn wrote.

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Ill say this for Alex Garlands half-formed but fully intriguing MEN, which cleaves much closer to the abstruseness of Annihilation than its discourse-baiting title might suggest: its rare to see a movie that evokes Richard Curtis and Lars von Trier in almost equal measure, David Ehrlich wrote.

The upcoming A24 film and Garlands third feature is a horror movie about a sense of horror, or, more simply, a ghost story, as the director told Entertainment Weekly.

In my mind, a film like Men is connected to a film like Annihilation, Garland told EW. Theyre very much about how youre feeling about something. Men is a gut-level film. Im proud of Ex Machina, I really love it, but its an intellectual film. Men is not, I think.

Garland continued, When I say its a slightly aggressive film, thats what I mean: Its coming at the viewer. Its a gentle movie sometimes, theres lots of silly humor in there, but its also a bit delinquent.

In the interview, he assured that, per the title, gender is indeed explored throughout what viewers are calling a surreal folk horror film.

It comes up a lot, in different ways, Garland said. With Men, I just sort of thought, Screw it, Im just gonna go straight into this. Maybe its just that with Men, instead of running underneath, it sits there on the surface.

He added of the independent film, Im in my early 50s and my main problem with film tends to be feeling bored. I sort of feel like I know where this is gonna go, I feel like Ive seen this or that sequence of events play out an unbelievable number of times. Im hoping to disrupt that a bit.

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Men First Reactions: Alex Garlands Visceral as Hell A24 Horror Film Will Make People Angry - IndieWire

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero