

More than anything, though, he’s after the shivery exhilaration native to the greatest thrillers-the sensation of scattered puzzle pieces locking into place, of reality peeling back its skin to reveal some deeper, hidden truth that’s been staring us in the face all along. Like those directors at their best, Garland wants to make you think and wince, ideally at the same time. Men, which is impressive and flawed in equal measure, adds to this legacy while suggesting its maker is still chasing master mind-fuckers like Stanley Kubrick and Nicolas Roeg, who also split the difference between intellectualism and viscerality.

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Or the software engineers of Devs, methodically decrypting sensitive material as if their lives depended on it.Īt a moment when the arthouse and the grindhouse have become definitively intertwined, Garland makes B-movies with A-plus effort he’s a schlockmeister who wears his pretensions like a badge of honor. His films’ power lies in the way they transfer those anxieties onto the audience think of the protagonist of 28 Days Later awakening from a coma in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, a stunning cold open that forces the audience to get its bearings as well. Few contemporary filmmakers are as attracted to confusion as Garland: His is a cinema of disorientation, of characters who don’t know what the hell is going on around them or what to do about it. It’s like a fissure has opened in her psyche, and out of it crawls all kinds of creepy, symbolic creatures, humanoid and otherwise-vivid additions to the menagerie her creator has been tending over the course of his career. Did he fall? Did he jump? Is any of this really happening?Īlex Garland loves his enigmas, and Harper’s inability to reconcile her trauma with any definitive answers about her own culpability gets under her skin and into her head. What comes after it hews closer to dreamlike surrealism: Still shell-shocked in the aftermath of James’s assault, Harper catches sight of her husband falling through the air outside their living room window their eyes meet for a split second as he flails against a blood-red sunset. This act of domestic abuse is abrupt, terrible, and all too plausible, a slice of real-life horror in a highly conceptual movie.

James threatens to kill himself in response before punching Harper in the jaw on his way out of the apartment-and, seemingly, her life. Harper Marlowe (Jessie Buckley), a 30-ish Londoner living in a stylish high-rise just across the Thames from the Shard, tells her husband, James (Paapa Essiedu), she wants a divorce, and she won’t take no for an answer. Men starts with the end of a relationship, and it’s a breakup with a body count.
