A pretentious, farcical movie with very little substance
The film’s premise is interesting, but it’s over-simplified and the themes are hammered to a pulp. The film becomes more of a chore to sit through than it should be.
Jessie Vuckley stars as Harper in Alex Garland’s Men, a film about a woman who goes on a two-week getaway to the countryside to escape her past. However, when James, her abusive ex-boyfriend, commits suicide shortly after she arrives, Harper finds herself haunted by his ghost. ..
When Harper arrives at her new apartment, she finds a forbidden apple tree in the garden. Jeffrey, the landlord, tells her that the fruit is forbidden and Harper soon settles in to her new home. However, Harper quickly discovers that she is surrounded by a number of different men who are each gaslighting her and blaming her for the trauma she’s suffering from. ..
In the movie, Harper is forced to try and survive from these horrible men. She runs away, repeats an incredulous “…what?!” when they’re revealed to be horrible and fights back… until she doesn’t.
In a shocking scene at the end of the movie, Garland and his team take a risk by showing the men in town on screen for just a few seconds. This move is risky because it could give away too much about the plot, but it pays off in the end and makes the audience feel more scared. Garland and his team are proud of this shot and repeat it nearly five times. The protagonist through all of this? The one who has spent most of the movie running away? Just casually standing around and watching.
The problem with Men is that it’s one of those films that thinks its super deep and proudly flaunts what it’s got. Like a peacock parading around a garden with its feathers up, Men tries to dazzle and impress with its themes, which amount to “Hitting women and emotionally manipulating people is bad” and “misogyny is hereditary and passed down through generations.” That’s it. There’s no nuance here; no shades of grey to make you think. ..
Despite its strong feminist themes, “Harper” falls short in its exploration of the character. We learn very little about Harper outside of her past trauma, and the film spends more time bashing the screenplay than developing her. ..
However, by the end of the first 40 minutes or so, things start to unravel. The exposition is heavy and feels forced, the atmosphere is gone and there are some jarring changes in tone that make it difficult to follow. There’s also a lot of unanswered questions that feel like they could have been answered more effectively.
The film starts out ominously and quickly ends without resolving its conflict. From a purely metaphorical or allegorical level, there is a conclusion per-se for Harper, but in terms of what we see on screen and what we’ve been led to believe with the story, the film just…stops.
Some people have argued that the shallow and paper-thin characters in The Last Jedi are portrayed that way because this is what writer/director Rian Johnson was intending and believing. My argument to that is the same thing I’ve said to anyone defending The Last Jedi or other films with poor writing. If you need to create your own head-canon to justify gaps in logic or character nuance, the screenplay isn’t doing its job properly. ..
There are people coming out of Men praising this movie for being super deep but when you really stop and think about it, it’s not. This is a male’s oversimplified impression of trauma and grief with nothing to say beyond “men=bad.” Men is a misfire; the movie equivalent of a stand up comedian constantly explaining the same joke for an hour and a half. We get it, guy, can we please get some substance and nuance? No? Oh, okay then.
