Men: how a decent horror film turns horribly, horribly silly... cinema review

Men (15), (100 mins), Cineworld Cinemas.
MenMen
Men

And it all started so intriguingly… before a catastrophic descent into total nonsense.

Doubtless plenty of people will argue that the brilliance and the subtlety of Alex Garland's new surrealist horror film Men is that it defies any clear-cut interpretation, so deep and meaningful is its art-house glory.

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However, plenty more will argue that it defies any kind of interpretation at all as total randomness takes over. The same man rolling along the floor giving birth to successive versions of himself really isn’t where you’d want to see a film end that starts with so much genuine promise.

Harper (Jessie Buckley) has witnessed awful, traumatising tragedy. She and her husband are divorcing – absolutely against his wishes. His response is to threaten to kill himself, a promise he apparently carries out after lashing out at her and brutally bashing her. Unless, of course, it’s an accident.

Either way Harper sees him plummet to his death – a moment which leaves her crippled with guilt, questioning, in denial, haunted etc etc. So far, so intriguing. She flees to a country manor rental, but this is when the first of Rory Kinnear’s many incarnations kicks off. He starts as a plummy mustard-corduroyed country type – eerily Little Britain-ish. Before long he’s doing the full Dick Emery, variously priest, policeman, surly abusive schoolboy and so on. We even get a scene where Harper is in the pub with four different versions of Kinnear.

You kind of expect James Maynard Kitchener Lampwick to turn up, swiftly followed by peroxide blonde Mandy to thump Harper on the shoulder and tell her ”Ooh, you are awful… but I like you.”

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It would at least have been entertaining. But maybe the worst Kinnear variant is the naked one who prances around the garden and eventually starts sprouting leaves. No, really.

None of it adds up to terribly much tension, not even when someone’s arm is sliced longitudinally and yet somehow still manages to function. For tension to emerge, you’ve simply got to have some sense of what is going on and what is at stake.

You get none of that here in a film which instead gets sillier by the minute, banishing all memory of the intriguing grip it started to develop in its opening 20 minutes.

You could tie yourself up in knots trying to kid yourself that something super intelligent is happening here that will yield itself to only the fiercest intellect…

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Clearly it’s all some kind of meditation on grief and guilt. But the connection between Harper’s dead husband and the raft of Kinnears that inhabit her troubled mind is hard to see.

In the end, all you can do is lament that a good starting point has gone grimly awry and that the film itself is the true victim in all this, fatally, cruelly laid low by clever-cleverness in fairly industrial quantities.

At times you wonder if we should actually be watching it as some kind of black comedy. In truth, it’s just laughably bad.