After missing out on seeing The Northman in theatres, I was in need of an A24 fix so I decided to see Men. I’m familiar with much of Garland’s work, with my favorites being Annihilation and the FX series Devs. As someone who veers toward the primitivist, it takes more than a spoonful of sugar for me to embrace high-tech dystopias in my free time, and Garland has always managed to make the uncanny valley approachable and aesthetically appealing to me. I was excited to follow Garland into a more rural and slasher-inspired atmosphere where the director could prove his versatility.

The film follows Harper, a slightly-chic Englishwoman, as she seeks to convalesce from a personal tragedy in the idyllic town of Cotson. Three hours from home (and her closest friend), this retreat can go one of two ways. Going into the film, I didn’t really know what sort of horror to expect, and the film let me steep in this ambiguity for a little while. While I wouldn’t exactly call it a slow build (things unravel fairly quickly), you don’t really find out what kind of horror movie until the end; it plays with horror conventions throughout, before ending with a smirk.

Spoilers Ahead.

I was quickly reminded of what makes Garland’s work so unique: warm, yet extremely modern interiors, soft lighting and symmetry, a preoccupation with choral music. It was actually the haunting sharpness and whimsy of the protagonist-created vocal arrangement that first made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. In this particular scene, Harper is enjoying her first walk through the countryside when she comes across an abandoned tunnel in the forest. The tunnel is huge, both in height and depth, and the shallow water covering the ground reflects its arch, creating a dark ring of black water and empty space. Invigorated from her walk, Harper casts her voice into the tunnel and it echoes back repeatedly, as an almost angelic choir. This goes on for a while, and the longer Harper spends in this one eerie locale, the more a feeling of doom creeps up on the viewer. Harper, obviously, is unaware of the premise of the film, its tagline, or that she’s participating in a horror movie at all. We, on the other hand, know that there has to be someone hiding in the tunnel (ostensibly a man), that danger is lurking, that she probably wouldn’t be singing into a tunnel if she knew someone else was there. The viewer is therefore immersed in one of those classic “the killer is right behind you” moments, with all the foreboding and anticipation that comes with it, without even seeing the lurking figure. This scene’s power lies in its length and its ability to create a powerful fear of the unknown in a limited setting. Even though we knew the man was there all along, simply had to be there, it’s hard not to jump a little when the figure finally reveals itself.

Eventually the naked figure who is magnetically drawn toward Harper and her womb-colored Airbnb is revealed to have some relation to a folkloric deity whose image can be found opposite a symbol of fertility on a creepily explicit baptismal urn in the local church. This sort of ancient European horror echoes the premise of films such as Midsommar and The Ritual, films which appeal to me because of their ability to dig up terror from the past instead of attempting to catapult the viewer into the horror of the future. This fanatical, nude man covered with blood and oak leaves is exactly what you might expect to find in the forests of a town as backwards as Cotson. The fact that this man comes across as menacing and bestial instead of delusional and pitiful is because of a few main factors: his nudity, his status as a man, and his silence.

The man is never armed when he approaches Harper and instead invokes fear through his evidently sexual and predatory approach. Why does a strange man gravitate toward an unsuspecting woman in her home? To do her harm, of course. Why does a strange, naked man attempt to break into the woman’s home? To harm her sexually, of course. This is an ingrained dynamic that we have all interacted with to a varying degree, therefore any further weaponization or characterization of the man is unnecessary; history and television have given us everything we need to know about this situation.

Men was far gorier than I expected, and I give it serious props for making me look away (birth is the most terrifying experience I can imagine). The ruthlessness of the bloodier scenes is something I was impressed by; Garland forces us to look at the last thing we want to see and wields his directorial power over the audience in this way. The image I, and probably most viewers, most struggled to conceptualize was the unnatural series of pregnancies and births which split forth from the male form. I came to interpret these bloated and stumbling figures as fathers giving birth to generations of unchanged men, who come tumbling forth woman-blaming, self-aggrandizing, hostile.

I’ve seen several reviews bashing this movie for a pseudo-feminist approach or for not having any inherent meaning or moral. Apparently, titling something Men warrants a more devout approach in some people’s eyes. I, on the other hand, applaud this film for doing what I think all good works of art do: provide the scaffolding for the viewer’s imagination and personal experience to flesh out and interpret in their own unique way. I don’t need to be told how to feel, or slapped repeatedly with a moral, even on something as personal and loaded as gender relations. And neither should you.