Men, review: Imagine if Lars von Trier directed an episode of The League of Gentlemen…

Men. Honestly, what are we like? Well, if Alex Garland’s new film has the measure of us, you may prefer not to know. Garland’s astonishing first project since his 2020 miniseries Devs is a bloodcurdling modern-day folktale, in which male manipulation of women – belittling asides, emotional blackmail, disingenuous grasps for victim status, and so on – are painted not as discrete slights, but connected gestures in an obscene, aeons-old ritual.

Its plot taps into the myth of the Green Man, whose leafy countenance lurks in the stonework of churches throughout Britain and Europe, and who Garland reimagines as a primal symbol of blokeish covetousness and malevolence: the eternal perv in the bushes, torn between the desires to pry and to pounce.

The film’s interest in male entitlement also nods at Garland’s 2014 artificial intelligence thriller Ex Machina, in which two self-absorbed tech types came unstuck after failing to realise the woman they regard as principal damsel in their own life stories is also the protagonist of her own. But Men is a looser, loopier, funnier, more nihilistic work – beginning as a familiar if polished rural stalk-’em-up, then shape-shifting into a mad and merciless Rorschach blot of pure depravity and terror, or perhaps a League of Gentlemen episode guest-directed by Lars von Trier. It’s the sort of film that rattles you in three ways at once: through the grim candour of its themes, the chill precision of its craft, and the nightmarish throb of its images.

It begins with a young woman called Harper (Jessie Buckley) travelling to the countryside after losing her husband (Paapa Essiedu), who has fallen to his death in circumstances that initially prove hard to decode. A prologue shows him dropping past the balcony of the couple’s London flat with a confused rather than terrified expression on his face, though his wife’s is smeared into a screaming Francis Bacon canvas by the rain-spattered glass.

To recover from this shock, Harper has booked a fortnight’s solo stay in a picturesque Gloucestershire farmhouse, which is owned by Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear), a ruddy-cheeked mustard cords and Barbour jacket type, who playfully chides her on arrival for eating an apple from the tree in the garden outside. (“Mustn’t do that. Forbidden fruit,” he chortles.) While exploring the local woodland, she discovers an abandoned railway tunnel with unusual echoing properties: a moment of surreal beauty that collapses into panic when a silhouette appears at the far end of the passage and starts running towards her.