Not Even Jessie Buckley Has All the Answers to Alex Garland's Folk Horror 'Men'
But, to her, it's not a horror movie.
This piece contains spoilers for Men.
You will likely walk out of Men with more questions than answers. Like director Alex Garland's other work, his new film, which blends folk horror with modern tragedy in a complex parable of gender dynamics, doesn't beg to be understood upon first viewing, or even second viewing, or tenth viewing. As with his feature debut Ex Machina, his sci-fi adaptation Annihilation, and his technoreligious miniseries Devs, Garland's Men has a lot going on and very little explanation, the double-edged sword of being both thematically rich and oblique.
The film, which follows a young widow at a cottage retreat deep in the English countryside, stars Jessie Buckley as guilty mourner Harper, Paapa Essiedu as her late husband James, and Rory Kinnear as all of the other men, donning facial prosthetics, various costumes, and digital de-aging technology to hound Harper until the movie's must-be-seen-to-be-believed climax. While Kinnear, as he must, goes for maximalism in his performance, Buckley plays Harper with a more internal sensibility, giving the impression of constantly arguing with herself inside her mind about what is her fault and what isn't, what is fact and what is fiction. As Men spirals deeper towards its core themes, enlisting the ancient mythological figures of the Green Man and his erotic female counterpart Sheela-na-gig to conflate its examination of modern gender dynamics with a primal sense of the natural world, Buckley shines like a lightning bolt, a fiery bastion against nature's green creep.
To help make sense of all this, Thrillist spoke with Buckley over Zoom, who wasn't about to give us any definitive answers about what the heck is going on, but spoke instead about the collaborative nature of making the movie, working with and against the complexities of her character, and her unexpected reaction to that showstopping final scene.
Thrillist: This movie has a lot to do with grief and assigning blame and Harper being unsure whether or not to blame herself. She's fighting with this notion that maybe she's at fault for this horrible thing that's happened in her past. And then you have that great scene with the vicar [played by Kinnear] where she outright rejects him saying that maybe it was her fault, but you can tell that she's still kind of unsure. Could you tell me a little bit about the formation and the complexity of a character like this?
Jessie Buckley: It was a kind of combination of who she was in the script, conversations with Alex, and conversations with Paapa, and Rory. Anytime you get a script, you just start kind of seeing it, or, in the world around you, you start reacting to it, and I'm somebody who takes whatever I'm reacting to, and then puts it in a pot and whatever comes out comes out. And it's nothing to do with me.
But, I think we're pretty complex people who can do very… I think we've got everything. I have the capability to do everything and anything. [What Harper feels] is not just grief of somebody dying, but it's also the grief of losing love, really, when a relationship comes to an end, and coming to terms with that grief, which is the catalyst for the whole trauma and the horror of what ensues after that.
You mentioned that you had a lot of conversations, and it sounds like a very collaborative way to make this movie. What do you remember from those conversations with the director and with your co-stars?
I'm not very good at remembering anything. But all I know is that it was a space where you could really bring in your wildest thoughts, and Alex was not only interested, but wanted to explore them, and to create a place for you to really try out anything. It just meant that coming to set was a very live thing. It was creatively very live, it wasn't just something that was set right at the beginning of filming. We are consistently being questioned and provoked, and in turn, we were provoking and we were questioning.
Alex would say that he is somebody who creates a collective conscious not just with us as the characters, but with the crew and the entire creative team. Ultimately, it's everybody's. How a grip moves a dolly and the camera is so intrinsic to making an emotional impact on one half a millisecond on film. You need a creative leader, somebody like Alex, to make that available. And then everybody's creating and everybody's feeling excited by that, and everybody's involved in the conversation. That's an absolute dream to make something like that. Unfortunately, that doesn't happen very often, but that also probably is why Alex is the filmmaker.
His movies tend to utilize the natural world a lot. And especially in this one, you have these wonderful scenes of your character going for that lovely walk in the countryside. And the nighttime confrontations were actually shot outside at night. What was it like to make a movie that utilizes nature and the outdoors in this way?
Oh, I loved it. I grew up in the countryside. I'm very hungry for nature. But also, I've never seen England look like this on film. And I think it's such an important part of this film, because I never, even when I read it forever ago, for me, it was never a horror, there was something much more seducing and hypnotizing about it. That landscape puts you under a spell. And the way Alex's shot it. Harper going to that place to be put under some kind of spell so that she can come to terms with her own pain and loss is so intrinsic to what happens and where it goes by the end. It's a character in itself, the turnover of nature and the notion of life and birth and things dying and things growing is thematically very important.
As soon as I saw the Green Man's face in the church [a motif seen in many old English churches and buildings whose meaning has been lost to time, thought to be a pagan representation of nature and rebirth], I was like, I know exactly where this is going. Obviously not exactly where it went, because it did end up surprising me quite a bit by the end. That final scene where Harper is watching Rory's characters doing this whole body horror birth train thing, she has this look on her face. It's not the traditional horror-movie-final-girl-screaming-in-terror reaction to that. What is your read on her reaction?
That's something that I was reacting to myself. The monster is birthing the monster and going through different kinds of forms of that. And I guess the question is, what is the monster? What is the wound? What is that? Why? What is the wound and the monster within our society that keeps recurring again and again, and what do we need to do to come to terms with that, so that we can actually move forward with each other? At the time, I don't know why, but I didn't feel horrified. There was almost like a goading, like, you've got to go through this. We've got to go through this. And I'm not going to run away from the things that I'm most afraid of anymore. And I'm not going to hold your hand because you have to go through that yourself, too.