Featuring two contrasting actor's showcases, 'Men' sticks with you. And it deserves to be experienced rather than explained, thanks to Jessie Buckley and Rory Kinnear.
and in Chicago is also playing at the Music Box Theatre, where audiences are used to a steadier diet of provocation.The film is organic, all of a piece and, for Garland, somewhat on the nose and didactic. It’s also haunting in ways you can’t easily categorize. It showcases two kinds of excellent acting. One is offered by the splendid, searching Jessie Buckley in a performance almost entirely guided by watchful, justifiable paranoia.
We begin in London, and a horrifying suicide. Throughout “Men,” in radioactive-looking shades of orange, we flash back to the words and acts of an increasingly anguished and abusive marriage preceding that suicide. After witnessing the fatal leap of her husband , the deeply rattled Harper retreats to a fancy, remote manor home rental somewhere in the English countryside. All she wants is some peace, and to begin to forget. “Men” has other plans.
Where all this goes is pretty astonishing and destined for a likely CinemaScore nightmare grading session. In this dark fable of grief, guilt and toxic male animals, “Men” culminates with the latest regeneration of these animals. We’re confronted by new men for all four seasons. I’ll leave it at that.