The horror movie Men is a thousand arguments waiting to happen

polygon.com:

If the sole goal of cinema was to provoke a memorable emotional response in an audience — to make them feel something, anything, as long as they feel it powerfully — then Alex Garland’s Men would be counted as an unmitigated success. The writer-director’s follow-up to 2014’s Ex Machina and 2018’s Annihilation is certainly going to leave audiences with some forceful sensations. It’s a provocative, button-pushing film, full of startling imagery and aggressive metaphors. Like so many of the projects that have given distribution company A24 a reputation for extreme visions, Men is unlikely to leave audiences feeling bored or indifferent.

But the actual responses to the film are likely to vary even more than they normally do around provocative films, because Men seems designed more to start arguments than to tell any kind of cohesive or meaningful story. Viewers are likely to come away arguing as much about what they actually saw on screen as they do about what it all meant. Garland has given them a kind of lush, moving Rorschach inkblot, open to so many different interpretations that it won’t be surprising if people walk away with an Inception-like experience where everyone finds a message based on their own beliefs, and an emotional response based on whether they think Garland is backing them up or telling them off.

The plot setup is simple to a fault. A young woman named Harper (Jessie Buckley) retreats to a gorgeous rented estate in the English countryside after a traumatic experience with her husband, James (Paapa Essiedu). Garland’s script reveals that trauma in bits and pieces over time, letting it change shape in the audience’s mind organically as each new revelation emerges. But apart from that inciting incident and