Alex Garland’s rural chiller joins classics of the genre from The Wicker Man to Cry of the BansheeThe Gloucestershire village at which our heroine (Jessie Buckley) arrives near the beginning of Men is far too pretty to be harmless: you just know something rotten has to lie at the heart of it, inches below all that lush greenery.
Alex Garland’s creepy, daffy, already somewhat underrated film – now streamable on Amazon – may probe male toxicity and female endangerment with a distinctly #MeToo-era lens, but it’s also rooted in a sturdy, shivery tradition of British folk horror, where the myths and traditions of the land become their own kind of threat.They’re embodied in the shape-shifting form of Rory Kinnear, playing the multiple men of this village, but also a single, villainous spirit of masculinity.
Riffing obliquely on the mythos of the Green Man, Garland’s script
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