A vaginal chasm opens on its body, and it proceeds to give birth to another adult version of itself, covered in blood and secretions. This naked, bloody, maimed figure enters the house.
At the same time, it is clear that the Kinnear characters are merging into one being. The subsequent car crash of a different Kinnear character results in a mangled leg, and the injuries suffered by Harper’s antagonists begin to mirror those James sustained in his deadly fall, as he was impaled on a fence: his leg mangled, his arm bisected by an iron rod.
Harper stabs a knife through his forearm, and he removes his arm without extracting the perpendicular knife, splitting his arm and hand fully in two. By my reading, which begins with Men’s much-discussed finale, this ungroundedness is the point: the film is about the interpretive work that women perform.Īs the Kinnear characters descend on the country house in the last part of the film, one of them thrusts his arm through the door’s mailbox slot. In the final twenty minutes, the film morphs, changing in a way that, though it would be hard to describe as a “twist,” disturbs the already muddy ground the film traverses.
As soon as Harper arrives at a country house, a series of increasingly menacing neighborhood men confront her, all of whom the audience recognizes as played by the same actor (Rory Kinnear). Protagonist Harper (Jessie Buckley) seeks solace in the British countryside after her husband, James (Paapa Essiedu), falls to his death in what was either an accident or a suicide. 1 Men proceeds from an interesting conceit, albeit one immediately apparent from the trailer. If the monstrous inscrutability of women has long animated the horror genre in films such as Alien and The Brood (both 1979), then the genre-expanding horror film Men (2022) ultimately recognizes a far more scrutable monstrousness in men.
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