In a word the answer is unsettled. I want well after the film has ended and I have either returned home or switched off the television to still be thinking about and uneasy with what was presented to me.

This is part of the reason why slashers, Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the like do very little for me. I am not principally interested ‘the kills’ and jump scares are only startling in the moment lacking in any lasting emotional weight. A good jump scare can add spice to a movie, but most are predictable, telegraphing their arrival well before the moment of sudden movement accompanied by a loud discharge on the soundtrack.

A monster movie can be better than a slasher, particularly when the monster has a symbolic role, such as ‘The Nothing’ in The Night House or The Babadook, each a representation of the horror of grief without losing the requirements of good story and tension needed for an excellent horror film.

But like jump scares, metaphor can be over employed yielding a less coherent experience that is more confounding than unsettling. Alex Garland’s Men is like this for me. Clearly Garland is tilling the fields of grief and regret with a plow of generalized gendered threat that is common to women’s experience in the real world. However, by the film’s end it is impossible to know what was diegetic, that is to say real within the fictional setting, and what was cinematic metaphoric convention for the audience’s consumption. Rory Kinnear portrayed every male role in the film except for Harper’s deceased spouse. Now, as a metaphor intended for the audience that’s fine and dandy. We understand why harper takes no notice that every man she meets in the village wears the same face, because only we are seeing that repeated appearance. But, in the film’s final sequence when her friend Riley arrives, the detritus of the previous night’s horrific events is strewn about indicating that this was not a symbolism of Harper’s trauma but diegetic reality. If that’s the case, then why did Harper not react to all the men being physically the same? It’s a circle I can’t seem to square. Men has many a scene, shot, and sequence that is vastly unsettling, but the interpretation is so difficult that I find the film impossible to enjoy. half-way to Lynch leaves me stranded.

I recognize that I am ‘tough room.’ There are many recent horror films that have been enthusiastically embraced by the community that failed for me but luckily the genre is wide and deep enough that there are plenty of films for all of us.