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You hide, I'll seek
Alex Garland's Men (2022) does not fail for me because I disagree with its folk horror, but it does require something like a suspension of mythological belief. Of all the folkways from which to draw an avatar of toxic masculinity, it would never have occurred to me to choose the Green Man, especially as such bluntly primal proof that #yesallmen. For two out of three acts nonetheless, the conceit throws out fruitful runners into the film's fractally off-kilter contemplations of guilt, grief, and gender. Beyond that point, I want the mythopoetic drum circle to get off my lawn.
Past the high-rise window of a flat steeped in sunset to a tisane of blood, a man falls as slowly and unstoppably as the rain; before a row of decaying cottages half absorbed into the forest's edge, a field of dandelion clocks loosens to the wind. The countryside through which the M4 winds Jessie Buckley's Harper Marlowe in her trim teal Ford Fiesta is so burgeoning and virescent, it could be a green mouth opening to deliver her to the dry stone lanes and red phone boxes of her two-week retreat at a sixteenth-century manor house for which she confesses in awe and embarrassment that she "might have splashed out just a little bit too much." With the mod cons of electric kettle and flatscreen TV socketed into its flagstones and oak beams and a jumble sale of pastoral watercolors and blue-and-white china decorating the Pompeiian smolder of its walls, it's as uncanny a chocolate box as any place so long lived in and despite a few conversational bobbles with the heartily tactless owner, Harper as she makes herself tea and touches base with a London friend looks much more at home on semi-holiday in Herefordshire than in her red-eyed memories of St Katharine Docks. Striding out for an inaugural walk among the ferns and the bluebells and the rain that makes a luminous nave of leaves, she cuts a faun's figure with her dark slant of hair falling in her eyes, hands in the pockets of her soldierly watch coat. Framed by apples and wisteria through the small-leaded panes of the living room, she could pass for an Austen heroine as she practices classically at the piano she demurred to her host about playing. The verdant land seems so reverberant to her presence that when she finds her voice bouncing back from the inside of an abandoned rail tunnel far longer and clearer than the laws of acoustics should allow, we share her delight rather than dread as she duets with herself and the moss-flocked stones, the almost acidly reflecting pool of rain-ringed water at her feet. Only when a previously unseen figure—vaguely silhouetted, yet legibly male—rises from the far leaf-lit end of the tunnel as if it has been listening in secret all the while does she falter, the looping echoes fade. The tunnel takes up a harsh staccato cry like a piston of crows; the figure runs toward her with the distance-stretching slowness of a dream and she flees as if in real, ancient panic, the fear of wild places inflicted by the goat-god. She breaks cover among the rotting bricks of the railwaymen's houses, but when she pulls out her phone to memorialize her rural urbex, inexplicably under the thin lichened boughs is standing a mother-naked man, off-color as peeled bark, and unlike many a haunting he's still there in the shot hours later when she studies it suspiciously in the bath. He's there in the garden the next day, inspecting the branch from which she broke and ate a small, half-blushed apple on arrival, thrusting an earth-grimed hand as suddenly as a tongue through the mail slot; neither of the arresting officers seems to notice the violent emerald of his eyes, how his skin beneath its rough sleeper's scabbed grazes is scrofulous with lichen. "Stinks to high heaven, though," the sympathetic policewoman who takes Harper's statement confides. As if something has been woken in the green of Cotson, the film's weirdness will proliferate exponentially from this encounter and yet it has always been present, the shadow preceding what casts it. Or as Harper catalogues her day in exhausted disbelief, "I meet a boy in a churchyard who tells me I'm a stupid bitch, then I meet a vicar who tells me that I drove James to kill himself, then I meet a policeman who tells me that they just released the naked weirdo who tried to break into the house yesterday and . . . I'm done."
At times the film feels in dialogue with John Bowen's Robin Redbreast (1970), another collision of modern womanhood with the sexuality of the land. Harper in the church where she screams her pain like a sermon is transfixed by the foliate head on one side of the font, the sheela-na-gig on the other like obverse and reverse of the same wood's coin. Her marital status is a matter of local comment, as if even in the twenty-first century there is something unsettled about a Mrs. Marlowe who insists on Ms. Perhaps her singlehood is not entirely settled for her, covering her inadvertent booking of the rental under her married name with the implication of a divorce rather than the shocks of bereavement that slice through a late gilding of light or the full-body slam of a door, the guilt that gnaws from never knowing whether her husband fell four stories to his death in a hideous accident or a suicide set like a curse on her resolve to leave him for the same reason she had to call his coercive bluff: "Because I have a life, too! I have a fucking life!" The failed joke of a stern admonition about forbidden fruit lingers allusively—sin, shame, Summerisle—over a narrative in which women are time and again held culpable for the choices of men. It happens so casually at first, it doesn't even feel like an irony that the space she's tried to give herself from her trauma seems instead to be transforming into a prism for it, the echo-faced refractions she finds everywhere in the village pitched at just the right horror of plausible deniability, less of the uncanny than of heteronormative human behavior. Harper gets the tour of Cotson Manor from the brightly bluff Geoffrey, so obviously the endling of some dwindled gentry for whom Airbnb is the last, best hope of paying the bills that the audience can almost overlook in his Barbour-jacketed haplessness how obstructively as well as comically he fumbles the bags he insists on lugging out of the car for her when she could have done a neater job herself. "If you need me," he offers wistfully, "you've got my number." The schoolboy loitering on the moss-splotched steps of the church sports a caricature mask of Marilyn Monroe; his face behind the garish plastic is adult as a changeling's, his hostile eyes poison-green. "You can't hide?" he cajoles like double-speaking. "Go on. I bet you're good at it. And I'm good at seeking." The silver-combed vicar in his black cassock teases out her fears and just as solicitously rakes her with them, one hand pressing her skirted knee with an unchanged air of mild, pastoral inquiry: "Do you prefer things to be comfortable or true? Might it be true that if you'd given him the chance to apologize, he'd still be alive?" His fingers spread over the slats of the wooden bench as if feeling for her warmth when she's gone. Over his pint at the pub with the rest of the all-male regulars, the off-duty policeman who turned loose her nuisance alarm of a home intruder grimaces defensively at her distress: "You saw him twice. I don't know if he saw you once. It's not quite stalking, is it?" The whip-round of glances as she storms out without touching the vodka tonic she wasn't even permitted to pay for underscores what the facially perceptive viewer may have already picked up. Every male part in the village—the Green Man is no exception—is played by Rory Kinnear. It works because no one comments on it; it feels like a metaphor, not a stunt. Catching the likeness to her landlord in a sap-skinned vagrant, the not quite twinship of the broken-veined local lads who stare after her in the Cotson Sheaf, even we can't know if we're seeing possession or projection, a world full of hammers when you feel like a nail or a revelation of reality ley-line deep. The best of Men plays in this space of suggestion, the implication of a pattern neither clarified nor disproved. The tranquil, formal notes of Harper's piano seem to wind from the sunlit leaves of the apple tree over the cloud-banded fields into the deep, shadowy, moss-groined wood, just as the echoes of her singing will emerge from the earth to overdub themselves like residual tape loops onto the shadows of the church and the sunset-misted meadow, the dripping cavity of a dead stag's eye. Geoffrey cudgels his brain for the dying-rising crossword clue of a pomegranate like the red rinds we saw in the Marlowes' flat. A school jumper is stitched with a jagged globe of tree. The more we see of the terrible last fight between Harper and James, the less finished it feels, but none of her interactions with the Cotson men offer any direct line of challenge or closure so much as a free-floating fog of microaggressions and triggers like variations on an inexorable theme. What kind of countryside has she come to anyway, where she can find apples and bluebells in the same season and the fields curve the same luciferin green between the hedgerows as the lily-flecked slopes of the wood? The Green Man grows ever more thorn-barbed, leaf-pierced, twig-antlered, his ultimate face an epiphytic mask with blood at its roots. He never looks human and as he sits cross-legged in a lichen-stained bunker left over from the Second World War, his own fingers peel back his brow to plant the oak's green flag.
I have no idea why so many narratives burn slow just fine for two acts before dropping the matches and lighting themselves on fire in the third, but I've seen it as far back as classic Hollywood and it is annoying every time. The home stretch of Men is the most action-packed and conventionally scary part of the movie, complete with ghosts in the smartphone and supernatural home invasion and attempted rape and vehicular ramming and the vanishing stutters of electric light; the effect is detaching rather than heart-pounding, not least because it damages some of the film's own argument. Of all the men who make up the mosaic of the Green Man, maladroit Geoffrey is the only one who shows our heroine much sympathy or attracts it in turn, blurting at a nervy moment his own patriarchal wound that has haunted him in his father's words since he was seven years old: "'You have precisely the qualities of a failed military man.'" It does not absolve him of his jocularity that can't read the room of a mixed audience, his constitutional inability to let a woman do anything for herself. As the manor comes under ever wilder whack-a-mole siege of policeman and punter and schoolboy and vicar, we understand it is inevitable that even a qualified male ally should fail Harper, as indeed Geoffrey does in characteristic fashion by forging chivalrously on past her protests. That he should reappear to offer her the same sexually tinged violence as every other man past the hour mark of the film, however, delivering the effective dead name of "Mrs. Marlowe" even more viciously than he dragged her by the hair from her car and threw her down in the road, feels less allegorically foredoomed than a serious step backward for a movie which had previously laid such fine-grained stress on the sneakier forms of misogyny, the quotidian smog of mansplaining and white-knighting that doesn't have to manifest as crudely as a blow or a grope to be a problem. The insistent fragility of each male claim on Harper's time and attention and body was understood to differ only in degree from her husband's extortionate demand that she stay in their shattered marriage to save his life. Reducing their threat to the bluntest common denominator hobbles the maturity of the film: like the vicar whose soft-spoken over-intimacy flashes to full-scale victim-blaming assault between quotations from Samuel Daniel and W. B. Yeats, Geoffrey is actually more pernicious as an oblivious chauvinist than a malevolent aggressor; like the rest of the third act, it suggests a writer-director suddenly flailing for the bullhorn. Its most effectively creepy moments are the least obviously deciphered, like the apples of the manor garden falling all at once in a blight like hail. One minute Geoffrey is standing on the lawn in all his ineffectual reassurance, the next the Green Man covered in the stigmata of thorns and budding leaves breathes a handful of dandelion clocks toward Harper until one white-winged seed such as we have seen spiraling throughout the mise-en-scène is sucked down her throat like a scream to snow through the blood-red, hedge-green tintings of blurred memory over which the two carved faces of the font preside like altars far beyond the reach of the church or the countryside. His arm maimed like a split shoot of the Green Man, the schoolboy has transferred his Marilyn mask to the body of a neck-wrung crow and is pushing the composite of black feathers and woman's face—siren, harpy, swan-fathered Helen—back and forth as if to make it mimic the action of a fuck. "You're so mean," he chides Harper in his no-aged voice. "You wouldn't even play a game of hide and seek." Harper frantically texting a female friend as the wi-fi fritzes, Harper backed into the kitchen cabinets with a knife in a bursting spray of glass, Harper fleeing down the strip of lane between her own car's headlights and the sky-seaming gash of the Milky Way are operable images of terror, but they are much more familiar to anyone who has ever seen a woman menaced in a movie and their blatancy feels several gears stripped from the script's former willingness to let the audience connect their own dots.
I can't even say that the film disappears up its own ass because it is more accurately described as erupting from its own vagina. Actually the explosive cascade of mpreg which comprises Harper's final confrontation with the Green Man works for me as the lecture of jump scares which precedes it does not: it is mythically weird, earthily surreal, and none of its blood-drenched symbolism is spelled out for anyone including Harper, whose reactions alter credibly from numinous shock to a kind of blown-out state beyond revulsion or curiosity, the apotheosis perhaps of the evening's earlier done. Close-ups of each successive parturition suggest a conflation of the sheela-na-gig and the Green Man somewhat less to my taste than the tree-fucking, bird-birthing Holly-jack of Robert Holdstock's Lavondyss (1988), but since the film lost the plot for me folklorically with its premise, I can admire instead how like a compression of year-kings each avatar is brought forth already gestating his successor to spill from his discarded husk. The schoolboy crawls blood-painted from the deflated belly of the Green Man, screams until the vicar twists from the caul of his cocooning skin, his spine blood-eagles itself to slough Geoffrey who slips in his afterbirth trying to reach Harper, laughing until his sobs are choked by the pair of feet sprouting dicotyledonously from his mouth and what is convulsed out at last in the apricot-colored dawn is Paapa Essiedu's James Marlowe, naked except for the sticky modesty of his blood and the death-wounds which we watched accumulate over the course of the night on the Green Man, the stick-snapped ankle, the reed-split arm of a man half-crucified on a spiked railing by the Thames, looking over at the woman sitting beside him on the sofa with an axe across her lap and saying as if it were any more reasonable than the last words they exchanged, "So I died . . . This is what you did." It is the same accusation he made to Harper when it was only a threat, as if no time has passed since that terrifying moment among the metallic drops of rain when she thought their eyes met as he fell. If she needed confirmation that in death he would remain as relentlessly needy and manipulative as he showed himself to be in life, here it is, a ghost vomited up out of the immemorial roil of men's fractured needs and poses still trying to claim from his widow what he died believing he was owed even beyond life: "Your love." On her wry, tired stare past the fourth wall, the title comes up like a sting. It's catharsis through sheer stupidity, a last act of selfishness so incredible it may finally serve as its own exorcism. I just wish neither we nor Harper had had to wade through quite so many anvils to get there.
Even the film's grace note does not recover its original ambiguity so much as cast doubt on its calibration of reality to begin with. The mid-credits epilogue plays from the perspective of Gayle Rankin's Riley, herself heavily pregnant and as good as her word in ragging it all night up the motorway after her video call with Harper cut off in strange screaming static. Her objective witness makes clear that more than metaphor went down at the manor last night; her reactions to the cracked-up Ford Fiesta, the birth-trail drying across the threshold of the house, the sight of Harper with her throat still ringed in her attacker's blood verify that our heroine's experiences were not all in her haunted head. Harper's meditative twirling of a tiny green oak leaf, her smile suddenly unfolding as she catches sight of her friend suggest a beginning of healing beyond her refusal of James and all that was demanded of her through the Green Man. Riley promised her ice cream and walks and roast dinners. Perhaps she'll have her holiday after all. But if everything happened just as hallucinatorily as it looked, literally where does this leave the village's men, who are conspicuously not lying around as shed skins of themselves or even heaps of dead leaves? It would fall well within the autochthonous parameters of folk horror for Cotson to be inhabited solely by emanations of the Green Man like some village-green clonal colony, the logical extension of Harper's telling impression of her landlord as a "very, very specific type," but this reading does not square with the intermingled reality checks of characters like the operator who answers Harper's panicked 999 call or the friendlier of the officers dispatched to the scene, whose very casting—they are played by Sonoya Mizuno and Sarah Twomey—establishes them as exempt from the testosterone-and-humus-fueled reflector of the plot. Harper rented the manor from someone, even if he wasn't the Geoffrey she met. Someone who wasn't her bled all over the place. Should we imagine real individuals absorbed into the event horizon of the Green Man? Mythagos of the synthesis between the wild wood and Harper's emotional disorientation? It is not necessary or even desirable for me to know how much of a narrative takes place in consensus reality rather than any of the alternatives, but Men makes it enough of a question that it feels unsatisfying rather than meaningful for it to leave unaddressed its contradictions of traumatized perception and mythical incursion. Personally, I would love to know whose faces the schoolboy, the publican and so forth are wearing now.
It is never fair to fault a story for not being the one you want it to be, but the fact remains that I would feel much friendlier toward the ambitious faults of Men if it were more ambivalent in its otherwise formidable treatment of the Green Man. Bias disclosed in the form of at least three poems I have written in the mythos myself, but Garland's full-frontal equation with the monstrous masculine flattens a wild thicket of old weirdness into a sort of polemic topiary that does a disservice to the near-century of rich and prolific fakelore that has flourished ever since Julia Somerset, Lady Raglan declared the architectural motif of the foliate head evidence of pagan persistence into the modern, Christian day. The identification of the feminine with civilization may be as old as Šamḫat, but it sits oddly when Harper's early scenes place her so literally in tune with the land; even a later one seems to tease her resonance with the sheela-na-gig, the stone-carved woman holding the folds of herself brazenly or apotropaically apart, before the blame she receives for inspiring such fantasies nixes any chance that the film is inviting her to become a participant in its verdant myth rather than a victim of it. It may go without saying that Men is a very straight, very cis film, even though one of the problems of misogyny is that it is not practiced strictly by cishet men. I may just have wanted the version of this story written by M. John Harrison or Mattie Joiner or Sylvia Townsend Warner. I prefer room in the bracken for everything from the Pearl-Poet's Green Knight to Greer Gilman's Tom o Cloud. And still I seem to wind up feeling about this movie something the way I feel about Mollie Hunter's A Stranger Came Ashore (1975), a selkie novel I have loved since fifth grade even though its central figure means something so different and much darker to his author than to me that I cannot on some level accept it as canonical—Garland may be almost orthogonally interested in the Green Man as far as I am concerned, but he realizes his vision so intensely that even when it bottoms out on its own metaphor I am not sorry to have experienced it. The film looks stellar. The cinematography by Rob Hardy captures the pollen-glaze of gilt-filtered light as eerily as the radioactive smears of moss leaching like lime down long-derelict stone. Without resorting to two-strip Technicolor, the red-and-green color scheme is maintained as scrupulously as a novel by Tanith Lee right down to the costume design by Lisa Duncan which furls the olive drab of Harper's coat over mullein-red trousers or a peach-colored dress. The countertenor on the dense and tensile, medievally inflected score by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow lends an ecclesiastical air to some of the most visually pagan scenes while also braiding with Harper's own voice in an appropriately recursive palette. The same song brackets the action, sung first by Lesley Duncan, then covered by Elton John. Buckley uses her own Irish accent throughout, a clever, natural note of outsiderness in the English countryside; her relatively light dialogue lets her vivid face carry the weight of keeping Harper herself on the right side of archetype, as thorny as the trouble she's facing. Kinnear can hang up his hat as the heir to Alec Guinness if he wants to, but what's more impressive is how little like a one-man show his ninefold casting feels. I watched their near double act on Kanopy, but it streams on a variety of usual suspects. I can always read Alan Garner or Geraldine McCaughrean to recover, or just climb a tree. This game brought to you by my specific backers at Patreon.
Past the high-rise window of a flat steeped in sunset to a tisane of blood, a man falls as slowly and unstoppably as the rain; before a row of decaying cottages half absorbed into the forest's edge, a field of dandelion clocks loosens to the wind. The countryside through which the M4 winds Jessie Buckley's Harper Marlowe in her trim teal Ford Fiesta is so burgeoning and virescent, it could be a green mouth opening to deliver her to the dry stone lanes and red phone boxes of her two-week retreat at a sixteenth-century manor house for which she confesses in awe and embarrassment that she "might have splashed out just a little bit too much." With the mod cons of electric kettle and flatscreen TV socketed into its flagstones and oak beams and a jumble sale of pastoral watercolors and blue-and-white china decorating the Pompeiian smolder of its walls, it's as uncanny a chocolate box as any place so long lived in and despite a few conversational bobbles with the heartily tactless owner, Harper as she makes herself tea and touches base with a London friend looks much more at home on semi-holiday in Herefordshire than in her red-eyed memories of St Katharine Docks. Striding out for an inaugural walk among the ferns and the bluebells and the rain that makes a luminous nave of leaves, she cuts a faun's figure with her dark slant of hair falling in her eyes, hands in the pockets of her soldierly watch coat. Framed by apples and wisteria through the small-leaded panes of the living room, she could pass for an Austen heroine as she practices classically at the piano she demurred to her host about playing. The verdant land seems so reverberant to her presence that when she finds her voice bouncing back from the inside of an abandoned rail tunnel far longer and clearer than the laws of acoustics should allow, we share her delight rather than dread as she duets with herself and the moss-flocked stones, the almost acidly reflecting pool of rain-ringed water at her feet. Only when a previously unseen figure—vaguely silhouetted, yet legibly male—rises from the far leaf-lit end of the tunnel as if it has been listening in secret all the while does she falter, the looping echoes fade. The tunnel takes up a harsh staccato cry like a piston of crows; the figure runs toward her with the distance-stretching slowness of a dream and she flees as if in real, ancient panic, the fear of wild places inflicted by the goat-god. She breaks cover among the rotting bricks of the railwaymen's houses, but when she pulls out her phone to memorialize her rural urbex, inexplicably under the thin lichened boughs is standing a mother-naked man, off-color as peeled bark, and unlike many a haunting he's still there in the shot hours later when she studies it suspiciously in the bath. He's there in the garden the next day, inspecting the branch from which she broke and ate a small, half-blushed apple on arrival, thrusting an earth-grimed hand as suddenly as a tongue through the mail slot; neither of the arresting officers seems to notice the violent emerald of his eyes, how his skin beneath its rough sleeper's scabbed grazes is scrofulous with lichen. "Stinks to high heaven, though," the sympathetic policewoman who takes Harper's statement confides. As if something has been woken in the green of Cotson, the film's weirdness will proliferate exponentially from this encounter and yet it has always been present, the shadow preceding what casts it. Or as Harper catalogues her day in exhausted disbelief, "I meet a boy in a churchyard who tells me I'm a stupid bitch, then I meet a vicar who tells me that I drove James to kill himself, then I meet a policeman who tells me that they just released the naked weirdo who tried to break into the house yesterday and . . . I'm done."
At times the film feels in dialogue with John Bowen's Robin Redbreast (1970), another collision of modern womanhood with the sexuality of the land. Harper in the church where she screams her pain like a sermon is transfixed by the foliate head on one side of the font, the sheela-na-gig on the other like obverse and reverse of the same wood's coin. Her marital status is a matter of local comment, as if even in the twenty-first century there is something unsettled about a Mrs. Marlowe who insists on Ms. Perhaps her singlehood is not entirely settled for her, covering her inadvertent booking of the rental under her married name with the implication of a divorce rather than the shocks of bereavement that slice through a late gilding of light or the full-body slam of a door, the guilt that gnaws from never knowing whether her husband fell four stories to his death in a hideous accident or a suicide set like a curse on her resolve to leave him for the same reason she had to call his coercive bluff: "Because I have a life, too! I have a fucking life!" The failed joke of a stern admonition about forbidden fruit lingers allusively—sin, shame, Summerisle—over a narrative in which women are time and again held culpable for the choices of men. It happens so casually at first, it doesn't even feel like an irony that the space she's tried to give herself from her trauma seems instead to be transforming into a prism for it, the echo-faced refractions she finds everywhere in the village pitched at just the right horror of plausible deniability, less of the uncanny than of heteronormative human behavior. Harper gets the tour of Cotson Manor from the brightly bluff Geoffrey, so obviously the endling of some dwindled gentry for whom Airbnb is the last, best hope of paying the bills that the audience can almost overlook in his Barbour-jacketed haplessness how obstructively as well as comically he fumbles the bags he insists on lugging out of the car for her when she could have done a neater job herself. "If you need me," he offers wistfully, "you've got my number." The schoolboy loitering on the moss-splotched steps of the church sports a caricature mask of Marilyn Monroe; his face behind the garish plastic is adult as a changeling's, his hostile eyes poison-green. "You can't hide?" he cajoles like double-speaking. "Go on. I bet you're good at it. And I'm good at seeking." The silver-combed vicar in his black cassock teases out her fears and just as solicitously rakes her with them, one hand pressing her skirted knee with an unchanged air of mild, pastoral inquiry: "Do you prefer things to be comfortable or true? Might it be true that if you'd given him the chance to apologize, he'd still be alive?" His fingers spread over the slats of the wooden bench as if feeling for her warmth when she's gone. Over his pint at the pub with the rest of the all-male regulars, the off-duty policeman who turned loose her nuisance alarm of a home intruder grimaces defensively at her distress: "You saw him twice. I don't know if he saw you once. It's not quite stalking, is it?" The whip-round of glances as she storms out without touching the vodka tonic she wasn't even permitted to pay for underscores what the facially perceptive viewer may have already picked up. Every male part in the village—the Green Man is no exception—is played by Rory Kinnear. It works because no one comments on it; it feels like a metaphor, not a stunt. Catching the likeness to her landlord in a sap-skinned vagrant, the not quite twinship of the broken-veined local lads who stare after her in the Cotson Sheaf, even we can't know if we're seeing possession or projection, a world full of hammers when you feel like a nail or a revelation of reality ley-line deep. The best of Men plays in this space of suggestion, the implication of a pattern neither clarified nor disproved. The tranquil, formal notes of Harper's piano seem to wind from the sunlit leaves of the apple tree over the cloud-banded fields into the deep, shadowy, moss-groined wood, just as the echoes of her singing will emerge from the earth to overdub themselves like residual tape loops onto the shadows of the church and the sunset-misted meadow, the dripping cavity of a dead stag's eye. Geoffrey cudgels his brain for the dying-rising crossword clue of a pomegranate like the red rinds we saw in the Marlowes' flat. A school jumper is stitched with a jagged globe of tree. The more we see of the terrible last fight between Harper and James, the less finished it feels, but none of her interactions with the Cotson men offer any direct line of challenge or closure so much as a free-floating fog of microaggressions and triggers like variations on an inexorable theme. What kind of countryside has she come to anyway, where she can find apples and bluebells in the same season and the fields curve the same luciferin green between the hedgerows as the lily-flecked slopes of the wood? The Green Man grows ever more thorn-barbed, leaf-pierced, twig-antlered, his ultimate face an epiphytic mask with blood at its roots. He never looks human and as he sits cross-legged in a lichen-stained bunker left over from the Second World War, his own fingers peel back his brow to plant the oak's green flag.
I have no idea why so many narratives burn slow just fine for two acts before dropping the matches and lighting themselves on fire in the third, but I've seen it as far back as classic Hollywood and it is annoying every time. The home stretch of Men is the most action-packed and conventionally scary part of the movie, complete with ghosts in the smartphone and supernatural home invasion and attempted rape and vehicular ramming and the vanishing stutters of electric light; the effect is detaching rather than heart-pounding, not least because it damages some of the film's own argument. Of all the men who make up the mosaic of the Green Man, maladroit Geoffrey is the only one who shows our heroine much sympathy or attracts it in turn, blurting at a nervy moment his own patriarchal wound that has haunted him in his father's words since he was seven years old: "'You have precisely the qualities of a failed military man.'" It does not absolve him of his jocularity that can't read the room of a mixed audience, his constitutional inability to let a woman do anything for herself. As the manor comes under ever wilder whack-a-mole siege of policeman and punter and schoolboy and vicar, we understand it is inevitable that even a qualified male ally should fail Harper, as indeed Geoffrey does in characteristic fashion by forging chivalrously on past her protests. That he should reappear to offer her the same sexually tinged violence as every other man past the hour mark of the film, however, delivering the effective dead name of "Mrs. Marlowe" even more viciously than he dragged her by the hair from her car and threw her down in the road, feels less allegorically foredoomed than a serious step backward for a movie which had previously laid such fine-grained stress on the sneakier forms of misogyny, the quotidian smog of mansplaining and white-knighting that doesn't have to manifest as crudely as a blow or a grope to be a problem. The insistent fragility of each male claim on Harper's time and attention and body was understood to differ only in degree from her husband's extortionate demand that she stay in their shattered marriage to save his life. Reducing their threat to the bluntest common denominator hobbles the maturity of the film: like the vicar whose soft-spoken over-intimacy flashes to full-scale victim-blaming assault between quotations from Samuel Daniel and W. B. Yeats, Geoffrey is actually more pernicious as an oblivious chauvinist than a malevolent aggressor; like the rest of the third act, it suggests a writer-director suddenly flailing for the bullhorn. Its most effectively creepy moments are the least obviously deciphered, like the apples of the manor garden falling all at once in a blight like hail. One minute Geoffrey is standing on the lawn in all his ineffectual reassurance, the next the Green Man covered in the stigmata of thorns and budding leaves breathes a handful of dandelion clocks toward Harper until one white-winged seed such as we have seen spiraling throughout the mise-en-scène is sucked down her throat like a scream to snow through the blood-red, hedge-green tintings of blurred memory over which the two carved faces of the font preside like altars far beyond the reach of the church or the countryside. His arm maimed like a split shoot of the Green Man, the schoolboy has transferred his Marilyn mask to the body of a neck-wrung crow and is pushing the composite of black feathers and woman's face—siren, harpy, swan-fathered Helen—back and forth as if to make it mimic the action of a fuck. "You're so mean," he chides Harper in his no-aged voice. "You wouldn't even play a game of hide and seek." Harper frantically texting a female friend as the wi-fi fritzes, Harper backed into the kitchen cabinets with a knife in a bursting spray of glass, Harper fleeing down the strip of lane between her own car's headlights and the sky-seaming gash of the Milky Way are operable images of terror, but they are much more familiar to anyone who has ever seen a woman menaced in a movie and their blatancy feels several gears stripped from the script's former willingness to let the audience connect their own dots.
I can't even say that the film disappears up its own ass because it is more accurately described as erupting from its own vagina. Actually the explosive cascade of mpreg which comprises Harper's final confrontation with the Green Man works for me as the lecture of jump scares which precedes it does not: it is mythically weird, earthily surreal, and none of its blood-drenched symbolism is spelled out for anyone including Harper, whose reactions alter credibly from numinous shock to a kind of blown-out state beyond revulsion or curiosity, the apotheosis perhaps of the evening's earlier done. Close-ups of each successive parturition suggest a conflation of the sheela-na-gig and the Green Man somewhat less to my taste than the tree-fucking, bird-birthing Holly-jack of Robert Holdstock's Lavondyss (1988), but since the film lost the plot for me folklorically with its premise, I can admire instead how like a compression of year-kings each avatar is brought forth already gestating his successor to spill from his discarded husk. The schoolboy crawls blood-painted from the deflated belly of the Green Man, screams until the vicar twists from the caul of his cocooning skin, his spine blood-eagles itself to slough Geoffrey who slips in his afterbirth trying to reach Harper, laughing until his sobs are choked by the pair of feet sprouting dicotyledonously from his mouth and what is convulsed out at last in the apricot-colored dawn is Paapa Essiedu's James Marlowe, naked except for the sticky modesty of his blood and the death-wounds which we watched accumulate over the course of the night on the Green Man, the stick-snapped ankle, the reed-split arm of a man half-crucified on a spiked railing by the Thames, looking over at the woman sitting beside him on the sofa with an axe across her lap and saying as if it were any more reasonable than the last words they exchanged, "So I died . . . This is what you did." It is the same accusation he made to Harper when it was only a threat, as if no time has passed since that terrifying moment among the metallic drops of rain when she thought their eyes met as he fell. If she needed confirmation that in death he would remain as relentlessly needy and manipulative as he showed himself to be in life, here it is, a ghost vomited up out of the immemorial roil of men's fractured needs and poses still trying to claim from his widow what he died believing he was owed even beyond life: "Your love." On her wry, tired stare past the fourth wall, the title comes up like a sting. It's catharsis through sheer stupidity, a last act of selfishness so incredible it may finally serve as its own exorcism. I just wish neither we nor Harper had had to wade through quite so many anvils to get there.
Even the film's grace note does not recover its original ambiguity so much as cast doubt on its calibration of reality to begin with. The mid-credits epilogue plays from the perspective of Gayle Rankin's Riley, herself heavily pregnant and as good as her word in ragging it all night up the motorway after her video call with Harper cut off in strange screaming static. Her objective witness makes clear that more than metaphor went down at the manor last night; her reactions to the cracked-up Ford Fiesta, the birth-trail drying across the threshold of the house, the sight of Harper with her throat still ringed in her attacker's blood verify that our heroine's experiences were not all in her haunted head. Harper's meditative twirling of a tiny green oak leaf, her smile suddenly unfolding as she catches sight of her friend suggest a beginning of healing beyond her refusal of James and all that was demanded of her through the Green Man. Riley promised her ice cream and walks and roast dinners. Perhaps she'll have her holiday after all. But if everything happened just as hallucinatorily as it looked, literally where does this leave the village's men, who are conspicuously not lying around as shed skins of themselves or even heaps of dead leaves? It would fall well within the autochthonous parameters of folk horror for Cotson to be inhabited solely by emanations of the Green Man like some village-green clonal colony, the logical extension of Harper's telling impression of her landlord as a "very, very specific type," but this reading does not square with the intermingled reality checks of characters like the operator who answers Harper's panicked 999 call or the friendlier of the officers dispatched to the scene, whose very casting—they are played by Sonoya Mizuno and Sarah Twomey—establishes them as exempt from the testosterone-and-humus-fueled reflector of the plot. Harper rented the manor from someone, even if he wasn't the Geoffrey she met. Someone who wasn't her bled all over the place. Should we imagine real individuals absorbed into the event horizon of the Green Man? Mythagos of the synthesis between the wild wood and Harper's emotional disorientation? It is not necessary or even desirable for me to know how much of a narrative takes place in consensus reality rather than any of the alternatives, but Men makes it enough of a question that it feels unsatisfying rather than meaningful for it to leave unaddressed its contradictions of traumatized perception and mythical incursion. Personally, I would love to know whose faces the schoolboy, the publican and so forth are wearing now.
It is never fair to fault a story for not being the one you want it to be, but the fact remains that I would feel much friendlier toward the ambitious faults of Men if it were more ambivalent in its otherwise formidable treatment of the Green Man. Bias disclosed in the form of at least three poems I have written in the mythos myself, but Garland's full-frontal equation with the monstrous masculine flattens a wild thicket of old weirdness into a sort of polemic topiary that does a disservice to the near-century of rich and prolific fakelore that has flourished ever since Julia Somerset, Lady Raglan declared the architectural motif of the foliate head evidence of pagan persistence into the modern, Christian day. The identification of the feminine with civilization may be as old as Šamḫat, but it sits oddly when Harper's early scenes place her so literally in tune with the land; even a later one seems to tease her resonance with the sheela-na-gig, the stone-carved woman holding the folds of herself brazenly or apotropaically apart, before the blame she receives for inspiring such fantasies nixes any chance that the film is inviting her to become a participant in its verdant myth rather than a victim of it. It may go without saying that Men is a very straight, very cis film, even though one of the problems of misogyny is that it is not practiced strictly by cishet men. I may just have wanted the version of this story written by M. John Harrison or Mattie Joiner or Sylvia Townsend Warner. I prefer room in the bracken for everything from the Pearl-Poet's Green Knight to Greer Gilman's Tom o Cloud. And still I seem to wind up feeling about this movie something the way I feel about Mollie Hunter's A Stranger Came Ashore (1975), a selkie novel I have loved since fifth grade even though its central figure means something so different and much darker to his author than to me that I cannot on some level accept it as canonical—Garland may be almost orthogonally interested in the Green Man as far as I am concerned, but he realizes his vision so intensely that even when it bottoms out on its own metaphor I am not sorry to have experienced it. The film looks stellar. The cinematography by Rob Hardy captures the pollen-glaze of gilt-filtered light as eerily as the radioactive smears of moss leaching like lime down long-derelict stone. Without resorting to two-strip Technicolor, the red-and-green color scheme is maintained as scrupulously as a novel by Tanith Lee right down to the costume design by Lisa Duncan which furls the olive drab of Harper's coat over mullein-red trousers or a peach-colored dress. The countertenor on the dense and tensile, medievally inflected score by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow lends an ecclesiastical air to some of the most visually pagan scenes while also braiding with Harper's own voice in an appropriately recursive palette. The same song brackets the action, sung first by Lesley Duncan, then covered by Elton John. Buckley uses her own Irish accent throughout, a clever, natural note of outsiderness in the English countryside; her relatively light dialogue lets her vivid face carry the weight of keeping Harper herself on the right side of archetype, as thorny as the trouble she's facing. Kinnear can hang up his hat as the heir to Alec Guinness if he wants to, but what's more impressive is how little like a one-man show his ninefold casting feels. I watched their near double act on Kanopy, but it streams on a variety of usual suspects. I can always read Alan Garner or Geraldine McCaughrean to recover, or just climb a tree. This game brought to you by my specific backers at Patreon.
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Fortunately I can always trust you to follow the vines wherever they fork.
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I am honored by your trust.
Nine
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It budded out Cad.
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Nine