Alex Garland says the ending of Men is whatever you make of it

polygon.com:

Alex Garland’s Men — his horror-movie follow-up to Annihilationand Ex Machina— ends without any cut-and-dried resolution. It’s unclear from the movie’s final moments exactly how the conflict resolved, or how real any of the action was. The movie is packed with Biblical and pagan symbolism, but scholars have long debated the historical meaning of the two primaryicons Garland uses here, and Garland himself doesn’t offer any answers. Men is a heavily metaphorical movie that uses striking, provocative images for emotional impact, but it doesn’t lend itself to simple or definitive readings.

And Garland suggests that it wouldn’t matter if it did. Even if he were much more blatant about spelling out an agenda in the movie, he thinks viewers would still interpret it based on their own experiences and biases.

“Many, many times, I’ve encountered people who say, ‘This film is clearly this,’” Garland tells Polygon. “And what they really mean is, ‘It’s clearly this to me.’And that ends up being about them as much as it is about the film. It is about their response to it. It’s about their life history, it’s about their concerns about the world and their interaction with it.”

Garland points to the beginning of his career, and his novel The Beach, which director Danny Boyle eventually made into a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tilda Swinton. DiCaprio plays a novelty-hungry traveler who follows a rumor to an isolated island, where a group of international travelers are trying to keep a beautiful beach to themselves, fearing that tourism and popularity will ruin their paradise.

Garland says he intended the story to be critical of the backpacker scene. “And I very quickly became aware that some people were reading it as celebratory