JESSIE BUCKLEY AND RORY KINNEAR CHAT TO ABOUT THE ARMY OF DOPPELGANGERS IN THEIR FILM MEN AND SUBVERTING HORROR TO SPARK DEBATE
LOST in grief after the tragic death of her husband, a young woman named Harper arrives alone at a large, secluded house in the English countryside seeking respite.
You’d be forgiven for presuming at this point that Men might be a conventional horror – all haunted houses and bloodied apparitions – but it is directed by Ex Machina’s Alex Garland. This will be no ordinary scary movie.
Men, starring Olivier Awardwinning actors Jessie Buckley and Rory Kinnear, is as much a story about the crisis of masculinity, grief, regret and cultural expectations as it is a folk horror.
The Lost Daughter and Chernobyl star Jessie, 32, plays Harper, a widow who has just witnessed her husband falling from the balcony in their home to his death. She retreats to the countryside for an escape, renting a grand house which she hopes will be an idyllic refuge.
But the house turns out, as Jessie puts it, to be “its own pulsating creature, a place where walls are constantly in danger of being broken into, the door is like a vortex where things suddenly change”, and something in the surrounding woods seems to be stalking her.
The village is full of men all bearing the same face – Rory’s – and soon her visit descends into a nightmare full of her darkest memories and fears.
The first man that Harper meets is Geoffrey, the owner of the house. Rory, 44, describes him a “bumbling country squire” and “a gentle presence who means no harm” – but the same can’t be said of all the other men with Rory’s face that Harper encounters throughout her stay.
There’s the naked, wounded man in the grounds of the house who morphs into a mythic Green Man; the nine-year-old delinquent boy with a child’s body but an adult man’s face; the odious vicar, who Jessie describes as
“decidedly the most threatening and emotionally violent”; the conceited policeman; the taciturn pub landlord – and more.
This army of doppelgangers adds up to a sinister, oppressive atmosphere in Alex’s skilled hands.
“I’m interested in doing things I haven’t seen before, things that are distinctive and bold,” says Rory, who is probably best known for playing Bill Tanner in the Bond series.
“Knowing I’d be playing several characters in Men, I was instantly taken in by that mixed feeling of not being sure how this was going to work, and being very keen to see how it could,” he reveals.
“It was exciting, it felt like working at one’s limits, one’s capacity. To start each day, quite often, sometimes creating a character afresh or trying to remember who that character was from having not played them for a few weeks... That felt like you were having to be nimble and on your toes, which was great.”
Rory adds that each character gave him a different aura – every time he’d step out of the make-up department he would feel like a different person.
“It was not just how I looked, but how I responded to people, and how they responded to me,” he says.
“Sometimes the reaction was so strong I felt like saying: ‘It’s still me, you know, guys!”’
Jessie was also thrust into an immersive acting experience. She appears in almost every frame of the film, with her emotions put through the wringer in every scene.
“It’s so exciting when you get something that’s consistently rich,” she says.
“And I loved her (Harper); I thought she had kind of a fire to her, somebody who’s choosing life, regardless of the fears that were surrounding her.”
She adds that she was gripped by “the wildness” of Alex’s story, “but also it was quite a clear, clean script.”
“I don’t think I’d read anything like it before,” she says. “It was all an exciting provocation, so it felt like a good thing to do.”
“You want to engage with stuff that is provocative, that asks questions of an audience, and also that you haven’t seen before,” Rory adds.
“It felt like largely a distinctive piece, as well as chiming in with lots of the different tropes of recognisable films and genres that an audience might understand or expect – he (Alex) was kicking up against those expectations.”
Unlike the conventional horror narrative, which often sees the vengeful force grow stronger throughout the film to a climax, in Men it becomes weaker and more vulnerable as the narrative develops.
“It was an interesting thing to work out because it takes away the one thing that, in pure genre terms, makes a horror film scary, which is the power of the monster to be invulnerable to attacks and the power to harm,” director Alex says.
“What happens here diminishes that power massively as that force becomes increasingly pathetic, so it perhaps invites a different kind of response.”
The film is bound to trigger some conversations around the relationship between men and women in society. Its stars say that Men can be seen as almost a fable, a folk narrative with a moral that could be perceived in different ways.
I don’t think I’d read anything like it before..
“I’m interested in what the conversations will be that come out of this,” adds Jessie. “I think to be in a film where it can stir debate, and people having quite opposite visceral feelings, is an exciting thing to be part of.
“But I definitely don’t have any answers. I’m as much a part of that conversation as everybody else.”
“I think Alex would probably say that he doesn’t have any firm answers as well,” muses Rory.
“He’s interested in the way that people engage with the themes that it brings up. And I think the themes are just as much about the way that trauma and grief repurpose themselves and have to be faced, or can’t be escaped, as much as it is about the wider picture of gender behaviour and the interactions of the sexes.
“I’ve seen it twice and it chimed with me in different ways both times that I saw it, and certain themes leapt out a lot more strongly.
“I don’t know why that is, what the ecology of my mind was at that time, but I was susceptible to being provoked in those different ways.
“I imagine it’s the kind of film that will continue to ask different questions.
“So hopefully, it will be a film that people will return to.”
■ Men is in UK cinemas from Friday