Men

Born
Identity

Men
UK 2022
Directed by Alex Garland
A24

Warning: Light spoilerage.

Okay... after not being all that impressed by the writer/director Alex Garland’s cinematic output over the years, I have to say I’m very shocked to have found he’s made a movie that I actually quite like. Yay! Finally I can say nice things about one of Garland’s movies. Well, okay, I really liked DEVS too (reviewed here) but, that was a TV show so it’s a different kettle of fish altogether.

Men starts off with an image of the central protagonist Harper, played by Jessie Buckley, left with a bashed up bloody nose, staring in contemplation from her flat near the Thames. As she looks out the window, she sees a man fall to his death. Then, sometime after these events, she goes to stay for a two week holiday in a big country home in an obscure village (said to be in the wilds of Hertfordshire). As the movie progresses, we find out that the man who leapt purposefully to his death (it is assumed) was her abusive husband, who had minutes before hit her.

The husband is played by Paapa Essiedu, which is an important point because, as she starts meeting people in the village such as the landlord, the policeman, the local vicar and a strange entity based on the English Green Man (but there’s also a mythic connection to something called the Sheela na gig thrown in for good measure too)... they are all played by Rory Kinnear (who people may remember as Tanner in the modern James Bond movies and also from his stand out performance as the Frankenstein monster in the brilliant Penny Dreadful TV show). And he looks a little different as each of, arguably, many characters (or manifestations of one character, take your pick)... and sometimes quite disturbing, as when his head is CGI’d onto a pre-teen’s body in a few scenes.

And it’s one of those films where the central protagonist, in this case Harper, spends a lot of time alone contemplating nature and trying to figure out what’s going on in the village as various strange things happen to her. As we find out more about the sequence at the start of the film, we find she is trying to come to terms with the guilt she is haunted by, for yelling at her husband after his abuse, leading to him jumping off the balcony of the flat above but, as she meets various different Rory’s, some of them nice but odd, some of them not so nice and some of them downright strange, it becomes a film where the male of the species somehow seems to encourage those feelings and offer far from comforting opinions and advice about the bloody end of Harper’s marriage. In fact, each of the men she meets, even the seemingly nice one (who I can just about see might be seen as passive aggressive... or just being a gentleman, depending on what decade you grew up), are in some way an intimidating presence in her life.

And that’s as far as I’m going with the plot other than to say, the end of the movie is like if David Cronenberg had decided to remake Xtro but just kept piling on the body horror in excessive amounts. So if you are a horror person... this film definitely goes for it by the end. Depending on your interpretation of events as either real or metaphorical I guess... although it seems to me to be depicted as both.

And, it’s really nice to look at too. Garland makes good use of architectural details and natural shapes in the forest to frame his actors,favouring an emphasis on the centre of a shot and often echoing a tunnel shape which is the location of one odd scene early on in the film. Everything looks fantastic but then, I’ve never had a problem with the visuals on a Garland movie. Usually, my biggest problem with the writer/director is that he has a decent enough and intriguing set up and then kinda runs out of steam or becomes too obvious towards the end of his films. This one, however, doesn’t over explain or telegraph anything and also relies quite heavily on the viewer to bring their own interpretation with them... at least I hope that was the idea because, while I felt like I was being prodded but not quite beaten over the head by the slightly misogynistic male attitudes on display in the film, I did get the impression that we were also supposed to decode it in our own way. So, yeah, sorry if that’s not the case but that’s the impression I got from it.

And the special effects of all manner of goriness at the end is truly startling. You’ve seen some of this done before in various ways, I’m sure but I was surprisingly impressed by the imagination behind the concept of the effects on this one. The film is also full of signifiers to various things which may or may not symbolise rebirth or, in the case of a whole bunch of apples falling off a tree on cue, perhaps that should be ripening? Either way, the film leaves a lot unsaid and, in the case of this one, I think it’s better off that way. Oh... Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow provide one of their highly listenable scores for this but, alas, so far (at time of writing) there’s no glimpse of a proper CD release being on the cards anytime soon.

So, yeah, a short review of Men but I did enjoy this one and it turns out it’s a very nice slice of intrigue in the folk horror vein... linked to a kind of meditation on guilt but, again, whether it’s a metaphor for redemption or abuse is a question for each member of the audience, I suspect. This one’s worth a watch though, for sure.

Wild Cards - Three Kings

Joker Lives Matter

Wild Cards - Three Kings
Edited by George R. R. Martin & Melinda M. Snodgrass
Harper Voyager ISBN: 9780008283599

Three Kings is the 28th in the Wild Cards series of mosaic novels which have been going since the 1980s. This one is the second of the British interlocking viewpoints into the Wild Cards saga, following on directly from the various stories in the previous volume, Knaves Over Queens (which I reviewed here). Pop into my book index and you’ll see all the more recent novels, from the last ten years, have been reviewed here so if you want to get a flavour of what the Wild Card universe consists of, then you should maybe have a look at one of those earlier reviews before diving in here.

So, I said in my last review that I thought the new UK series, while excellent, had rather shot its bolt by having so many decades rushed through in one volume. So yeah, this one is set square bang in a few weeks ranging from February to March 2020... finishing literally before a real life virus shut down the nation. Coronavirus is, unsurprisingly, not mentioned here in any form and, since this is an alternate reality anyway, it doesn’t need to be. Something tells me though that, had the writers known just what would be going on in the world right now, they would have slipped some sly references in.

That being said, there are parallels to things happening right now as this particular story deals with rioting on the streets as the Twisted Fists (still headed by The Green Man from the previous story), Britain First and other factions fight in the streets as rioting breaks out at some point over the monarchy and who will be on the throne at the end of the story.

This one starts off with the dying Queen Margaret (Elisabeth drew the Black Queen and died from the Wild Cards virus before ever taking the throne, back in the 1940s) who entrusts Alan Turing, the Ace known as Enigma, to search back through the records to find her Joker offspring, abandoned at birth, as she fears both her sons, Richard and Henry The Ninth (as he becomes for a while) are incapable of taking over from her competently. And so is set in motion a chain of events involving Turing, Richard, The Green Man, Noel/Lilith, Constance the Ace fashion designer (still making protective clothing for the new monarchy, much to her anger) and one or two other players including, of course, the evil Irish crow Goddess Badb who is pretty successfully manipulating everything, unknown to all the others, in the hopes that she can turn Great Britain into a bloodbath of heroic proportions.

And like pretty much any of the Wild Card books you’d care to grab over the years, this one is a great, fast paced yarn full of pathos, drama, action and, as it happens, the death of at least one regular character (or more, I’m not going to tell you). This one is also one of the less fragmented of the mosaic novels. Unlike the last volume, which fit together various stand alone stories, this one is taken bit by bit from multiple viewpoints of specific characters and locks together as a quite seamless story. What this means is that you have specific goals and character motivations which you can focus on and watch (or read, I guess) play out as an arc over the whole story, rather than having lots of mini climaxes throughout.

It goes without saying, at least in the Wild Cards novels, that you care for each and all of the characters... except for the villains of the piece, obviously. Even though the pacing on this is terrific and the stakes are high (at least on a national level, it’s nothing compared to some of the threats faced in the Wild Cards universe which, quite recently, nearly saw the destruction of the world), it still manages to explore the subtleties and worries of the main characters in a way that will have you investing in their well-being from the start and, of course, that means the narrative can really punch you in the gut when each and every twist or death is just around the next corner.

In terms of its space within the engulfing Wild Cards shared universe, there really aren't that many links to the more US or global based novels in the series and there’s not even a Croyd Crenson sighting or much of anything about what’s been going on in the world since it almost ended in High Stakes (which I reviewed here). You won’t miss that though because there’s so much going on while the Knights Of The Silver Helix (as the Ace division of the British Secret Service are known) are trying to find any information at all which has been buried in the past about a possible heir to the throne before the Joker-hating Henry the Ninth gets properly bedded into the throne and his supporters take to the streets to attack the least fortunate heirs of the Wild Card virus.

There are shifts in allegiance for some of the characters here, as Aces switch sides or are asked to do things which go against their role in the grand scheme of things. And, of course, there are many sacrifices along the way, not just the loss of life but various acts of betrayal and redemption as the clash of the cold war meeting terrorist organisations like the Twisted Fists (technically) forces people into situations and actions which might seem unthinkable to them in lighter times.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about Three Kings... I’m not going to go into too many details here but I will say that, while there is a sense of resolution to things as they are, there are also some characters that I really hope they don’t leave behind. What I’m saying is... I hope this is another of the mini trilogys that pop up from time to time in the Wild Cards universe. I need to know what becomes of the relationship between Constance and Bobbin, for starters. And Alan Turing’s arc seems a little unresolved too, I would say. So I hope the next volume in the series is published sooner rather than later. These characters come alive so well on the page it would be a shame to lose them just yet, even though most of the main players in this one are in their seventies or over. As usual I will end this by saying that, if you’re a loyal reader of the Wild Cards books, Three Kings is an absolute winner. If you’re not that familiar with them though, this is really not a good jumping on point and you should maybe consider reading them in publication order.