A schlock horror village where evil has many faces
Men (15, 100 mins)
Verdict: No garlands here ★★★☆☆
Bergman Island (15, 112 mins)
Verdict: Pretty dreary fare ★★☆☆☆
TO THe posters on the London underground warning that ‘intrusive staring’ is a form of sexual harassment are now added posters advertising the psychological horror film Men, in which the male of the species is depicted as, variously, a bully, a creep and a psycho. nothing good, anyway. and that goes even for schoolboys and vicars.
Whether or not it was conceived as such, Men, like last year’s brilliant Last night in soho, is the horror arm of the #MeToo revolution. The central character in both films is a woman whose life would be infinitely happier without men in it.
as it happens, both films are also written and directed by men: edgar Wright made Last night in soho, while Men is the third feature, after ex Machina (2014) and annihilation (2018), by alex garland.
We often hear about the sisterhood of women but not so much about the brotherhood of man, maybe because it evokes a cheesy 1970s pop group, and who wants to be reminded of save your Kisses For Me? nonetheless, the declaration from this branch of the brotherhood is evidently that #MeToo is their fight, too.
Men begins splendidly. Jessie Buckley, who never gives a performance that is less than compelling, plays Harper, an irish woman whose estranged and mentally fragile husband (paapa essiedu) fell to his death before her eyes, following a huge row in their London flat.
in seeking to put the trauma behind her, Harper takes a two-week rental on a gorgeous, honeyed-stone Cotswolds house. and as she arrives, she picks an apple from the tree outside. any echo of eve in the garden of eden is strictly deliberate.
The ruddily jocular owner, geoffrey (Rory Kinnear), shows her round. Like the house itself, geoffrey is a quintessential english type and Kinnear has in which Harper has landed. For great fun playing him, talking one thing, there are bluebells in about the wifi ‘and all that mumbojumbo’. the woods at the same time as He’s full of breezy bonhomie; there are apples on the trees, but the only thing waxy about maybe that’s just a continuity him is his jacket. error. Maybe garland doesn’t
But of course there’s something know how the countryside works. not quite right about geoffrey and, Certainly, this feels like a film it soon becomes clear, about the made by a townie, with menace ostensibly charming bucolic world lurking behind every strong oak door, along every sun-dappled woodland path.
By the time Harper has been terrorised by a naked man, called the police, sought a fortifying pint in the village pub, been abused by a local kid and ‘comforted’ by the creepy vicar, it has become clear to the rest of us that all the male characters in this film, with the exception of her dead husband, are played by Kinnear.
it’s a neat device, plainly meant to reinforce the questionable notion that blokes, really, are all the blinking same. and Kinnear, a terrific actor, does a grand job.
But there’s a whiff of the dramaschool exercise about it; and i was also reminded too much of television’s The League Of gentlemen and the strange inhabitants of Royston Vasey — even, at times, of The Dick emery show of blessed memory — to take it seriously.
garland does his best to ramp up the scares, with a keening score and lots of religious symbolism and folk-horror tropes, not to mention a full-on body-horror spectacular. and as i say, he gets impressively committed turns from Buckley and Kinnear.
in the end, though, his film is undermined by its own chief conceit. it can work triumphantly to have one actor playing multiple roles (see, and then see again, alec guinness in the 1949 ealing masterpiece Kind Hearts and Coronets). But here there’s a sense of a message being hammered home so hard that the hammer breaks. n anOTHeR fine cast enhances Bergman Island, by the French director Mia Hansen-Love. Tim Roth and Vicky Krieps (the Luxembourgish actress who held her own so wonderfully opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in 2017’s phantom Thread) play a couple of filmmakers, Tony and Chris, who go to stay on the Baltic island where the forbidding swedish auteur ingmar Bergman lived and worked.
Tony is something of a Bergman expert, Chris not so much, but far more pertinent is our own knowledge. Those unfamiliar with the likes of The seventh seal (1957) will be left cold by Bergman island and frankly, so might those who think Bergman is the greatest thing since slices of rye bread with herring on top. The crux of the story is the gently fracturing relationship between Tony and Chris. But it’s pretty dreary fare, as is the film-withinthe-film, a screenplay taking shape in Chris’s imagination, which is brought to life by the always-watchable Mia Wasikowska as a lovelorn american. undoubtedly, there are some pleasures, and if you want to know more about Bergman without sitting through too many of his pictures, this isn’t a bad place to start. But as Bergman island wore on, i’m afraid i became ever more eager to get off.