Review: Alex Garland's 'Men' starts as an unsettling thriller about trauma, but goes off the rails in the end

Filmmaker Alex Garland’s latest jump down the rabbit hole of perception, titled simply and confrontationally “Men,” is like a Russian nesting doll — a metaphor that pops up in an unexpected and disturbing way in due course — as it takes us layer by layer into something that may not actually be there.

The story starts with Harper (Jessie Buckley), a recent widow who’s leaving London for some alone time in a quaint rural house she’s renting. The country life appeals to Harper, who plucks an apple off the tree in the courtyard and eats it. This earns her a rebuke from the rental manager, Geoffrey (played by Rory Kinnear), who admonishes her: “You shouldn’t do that — forbidden fruit.” He then guffaws, and tells her he was joking.

Harper wonders if she hasn’t stepped into some torturous dark place. When she sleeps, she relives the moment her husband, James (Pappa Essiedu) — moments after punching her in the face — falls to his death from an upper balcony, his look directed at her as he falls past the window. When she’s awake, she’s stalked by a man who has scars on his face and no clothes covering any other part of him.

Harper calls the cops to deal with the scary naked man, and later seeks some comfort from the town’s vicar. The fact that every man — the cop, the vicar, and the scary naked man — has a similar face (and are all, in fact, played by Kinnear) makes Harper’s hold on reality slip a bit more.

Buckley is quickly becoming one of our most reliable young actresses, and here she brings a morbid determination to the usual horror-heroine tropes. Equally adept here is Kinnear, playing the different strains of toxic manhood — the jocular landlord, the condescending cop, the judgmental vicar, and so on — with impressive shadings.

Garland — following up the android dreams of “Ex Machina” and existential dread of “Annihilation” — seems eager to make a point about trauma, and how it creates its own kind of monsters, and that those monsters are usually men. But whatever subtlety and tension Garland built in the first half evaporates into body-horror ickiness, as Harper’s imagined terrors become all too real.

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‘Men’

★★★

Opens Friday, May 20, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for disturbing and violent content, graphic nudity, grisly images and language. Running time: 100 minutes.