Men arrives on May 20 in the US. (Photo: A24) Alex Garland is back. The writer-director’s latest project is Men, produced by A24, the darling indie outfit behind films such as Moonlight, Hereditary, The Lighthouse, and more recently, Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth.
This is Garland’s second collaboration with A24, after 2014’s science-fiction thriller Ex Machina. Men is a horror film that stars Jessie Buckley (Chernobyl and I’m Thinking of Ending Things) and Rory Kinnear. Buckley recently received her first Oscar nomination for her supporting performance in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter.
Garland is known for visually rich and thematically complex projects such as Sunshine and Annihilation. The teaser trailer for Men promises something similar. The plot details are scarce for now, and all we have to go on is a 2021 Variety report which said that Buckley plays the role of a woman who embarks upon a solo vacation in the English countryside after her husband’s death.
The trailer opens with the view of a large tunnel that is leading into a forest. Buckley’s character is wandering through the woods when she spots the entrance of the culvert. She yells, and her yell echoes. Next, we see her amid church pews. A pedestal bears a monstrous visage. She spots Kinnear’s character beside an apple tree. We hear a horrible scream and the man disappears. Dozens of apples fall from the tree. A shot that would have been beautiful takes a sinister edge with Garland at the helm. After spotting the man again, she screams, “Why are you doing this?”
What with the apples, the church, and a title treatment that appears on snakeskin, the film’s Biblical themes are apparent. That’s it. The trailer is just a disparate collection of unsettling images. But it’s more intriguing than a typical plot-heavy trailer.
Men arrives on May 20 in the US.
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