Men (2022)
by contributing writer Sharon Gissy
If your partner threatens suicide if you break up with them, that is a form of emotional abuse. It manipulates your feelings of love and fear for them. Men is a film about a man who not only makes this threat, but who follows through on it. In the wake of this trauma, his former partner retreats to a quiet and idyllic house in the country to process this loss.
Men is the story of this partner, Harper, confronting this loss. The loss is a complicated one because she refuses to accept this feeling of guilt, knowing it is manipulative, but she is still haunted by memories and chiding male presences, some positively ghoulish, at every turn.
When Harper first arrives at her getaway, the caretaker Geoffrey lets slip some old-fashioned “country” misogyny that seems harmless, inquiring as to Harper’s absent husband. He also scolds her for “scrumping” an apple from the tree in the yard, calling it “forbidden fruit.” The Biblical metaphor may be overly obvious, but it has a hidden layer of meaning here. It is the first of a series of aggressions to come, from mild to overtly cruel, that cast blame on Harper for something she didn’t really do wrong.
Just when Harper is starting to find the solitude she wanted, it’s probably no accident that it’s in a womblike cave where she delights in hearing her own echo. This healing sojourn within the feminine is interrupted by the looming specter of a pale, naked man, wraith-like in appearance.
The stalking, looming presence of men following Harper within the film gradually gains more flesh and blood and thereby becomes even more disturbing. There’s the simple, childlike man who wants to play hide-and-seek with Harper–almost facetiously wearing the mask of a woman. There’s the vicar who, after listening to Harper’s story, attempts to provoke her feelings of guilt for “causing” her husband’s death by not giving him a chance to apologize for his actions.
There’s the police officer who tells her that the naked man who pursued her to her home, peered through her windows, and pushed his hand through her mail slot, cannot be held at the station because he didn’t really do anything wrong. Tellingly, though Harper explains that she noticed the man stalking her and saw him in a few different places, the officer responds that the man may not have seen her once, so how could that technically be stalking? Once again, he gives her reason to doubt her own narrative.
These men are all, in a sense both literally and symbolically, the same man. They’re all played with varying degrees of leering condescension by Rory Kinnear, though Harper doesn’t seem to realize this until the end. It’s funny that she tells her friend toward the beginning that the mildly inappropriate caretaker Geoffrey is a “very specific” type of man, when really, he ultimately ends up becoming every man.
The last half-hour of Men, which is the most divisive part, takes the preceding hour of psychological horror and twists it into full-blown physical horror. I find it admirable in its length for a somewhat abstract and experimental sequence. It pits Harper against every single one of the men who harassed and gaslit her at the village and reveals to her that they are really one entity.
She slashes that entity with a knife in one of his forms when he tries to reach through her mail slot with his hand and creates a wound that resembles the one her husband sustained when he died by suicide and split his arm against an iron railing. When Harper sees the same split-hand wound re-appear in other incarnations of the man, she gains a gradual awareness and finally asks “What kind of a creature are you?” “A swan,” it replies—one known symbol of swans being death and rebirth.
If Harper is finally confronting and grappling with her grief, one could argue that at least one of the men, brandishing the wound she inflicted on him and whining about how she hurt him, represents her husband’s voice. One could also argue that once again, a man slyly turned the blame for his pain right back around to her. He was the one who intrusively reached out and tried to grab her, yet the wound was her fault for defending herself.
Another interesting aspect of Men’s last act is how much it reflects and echoes the story that came before it. The forbidden fruit appears again. The symbolic scene of the hand reaching through the mail slot is repeated. The male entity grows leafy shoots and begins to resemble a moss-covered tree Harper admired in her one seeming moment of joy on her one solitary walk before she was startled by her male stalker. Harper’s song—the refrain she let out in the cave that echoed back at her—becomes a refrain of inner power as she battles her male aggressors, including the vicar who references the cave in a much more vulgar way now, and chastises her for her own tempting sexuality “singing” to them.
The final gruesome birth scene implies that Geoffrey, who essentially represents all the men, may actually represent multiple manifestations of Harper’s husband. There is a closing conversation again asking Harper why she did what she did–why she “killed” her husband. All he wanted was her love.
There are several different ways you can read Men, but the more interesting ones to me are the ones that keep Harper’s story, rather than a general commentary on men, at the core. It is certainly a story about Harper wrestling with her own demons, and the characters and apparitions in the film could be projections of invasive thoughts in her mind that won’t let her enjoy peace. They could also be various forms of her dead husband, from the subtly manipulative to the downright abusive.
Most people don’t like Men. Of those who do not, one common complaint is that it’s too obvious and on-the-nose in its depiction of misogyny or toxic masculinity. Another complaint, sometimes from the very same source, is that it’s too cryptic, and loses its way or the grasp of its statement or message. The last hall-of-mirrors act, which I found so intriguing in its echoes and reflections and culminations of what came earlier, is particularly reviled.
I wonder, what did people *want* Men to be about? I agree that it’s reductive and played-out to say that it’s trying to make a statement that all men are evil, or that masculinity is inherently toxic, or that the patriarchy still dominates American culture. Some critics imply it’s a bad thing to raise more questions than answers. Lead actress in the film Jessie Buckley says of the film, “I see the film as part of the intense conversation we are having between women and men right now. So much has happened politically and socially in the last few years, and I see Men as a provocation on all that rather than an answer.” If you think of the movie more as a conversation to be engaged in rather than a message to be delivered, it’s more satisfying.
