If one actor plays multiple roles in a film, that film is usually a comedy, as the technique is often viewed as an excuse for someone to show off their “wacky” versatility. That technique, however, and the presumption of how it’s applied is radically turned on its head in writer/director Alex Garland’s new surreal and discomfiting horror film, “Men,” from A24.
READ MORE: ‘Men’ Review: Alex Garland Crafts A Sneaky, Speculative Work Of Cosmic Horror
“Men,” the heady and creepy third feature film from the Oscar-nominated Garland, stars Jessie Buckley as Harper, a grieving widow who escapes to the English countryside hoping to find a place to heal from a personal tragedy. However, someone or something appears to be stalking her and what begins as a simmering dread and paranoia, so turns into a fully-formed nightmare.
Rory Kinnear co-stars as the man who owns the countryside home Harper’s AirBnB’d to get away from her life. But inexplicably, Kinnear also plays all the male characters essentially in the film, a bizarre phenomenon that isn’t explained, one that Harper never notices, and slashes at the movie with layers of mysterious meaning and adds to the overall sense of dread (read our review here).
From where we’re sitting, it seems this film means something different to everyone who sees it, which may be why Garland set out to provoke intrigue and intellectual stimulation beyond just fear and terror. Are we simply exploring grief at its core? Harper is a widow, after all. Or are we exploring trauma? Or, is the question of how those two elements affect one another. Maybe we are exploring the coexistence of men and women in society and the challenges one gender puts on the other? Are we to focus on guilt? Harassment? Religion? “Men” is haunting but enigmatic, and those questions might be up to each viewer and their personal experiences. Our Editor-in-Chief, Rodrigo Perez, caught up with the “Men” stars Buckley and Kinnear to get their insight into the questions this film brings to the forefront and their experiences making it a unique horror film. Their conversation follows below.
The film is a horror on the surface, but obviously, there’s so much more. What was your experience reading the screenplay versus making the movie?
Kinnear: We had two weeks of rehearsals before we started filming, which was basically the three of us [Alex, me, and Jessie] in a sitting room, talking about it from ten am until six pm every day. We would talk about our responses to the themes and our experiences around the themes. Then gently, we would nudge our way towards the actual script itself and see how those conversations fed into the scenes and the different characters. Some of it was just a question of changing dialogue minutely to how we felt those characters would react or speak, and some were more significant changes. Which meant that by the time we actually got to film it, we had a sense of shared ownership of the material and a sort of a working relationship that meant we felt comfortable and confident with each other to ask questions of each other and try and further our understanding of both the script and the character.
And, what was your emotional experience with the screenplay, and what does this movie mean to you in that way?
Buckley: Emotionally, I don’t know. When I was making it, anytime I would go home; anytime my partner would come into the room, I would scream. He had to remind me constantly that he lived there [laughs]. But [pause] emotionally, I don’t know, you just kind of get on, and you do it.
The film is obviously surreal and up for interpretation in some places. Were those conversations with Alex Garland meaningful in understanding the intention of the themes, the movie itself, or your characters?
Kinnear: For me jumping between different characters, I knew what Alex was doing by using them all as potential stock characters, archetypes, or figures of authority. But it’s difficult, you know, you can’t play a theme, or you can’t play an archetype. So, each one was essentially the same process to try and flesh out as credibly as possible—to make it seem as if that person existed, lived in that village and was as much part of the fabric of the village as the natural world around it. You sort of left the echoes and thematic impacts up to its accumulation rather than necessarily moment to moment.
And for you, Jessie?
Buckley: I think the intention was to ask a question, and Alex didn’t say these are my answers. We were all trying to experience, ask and understand rather than say, “this is what this is about” and “this is what I want people to come away from it feeling,” which makes it a very live experience for an audience as well. I think Alex is more interested in the conversations and debates that will come from this rather than projecting an idea of something. Many of those touchstones, like the kind of pagan myths and Adam and Eve, and even Rory being eight men, are there for you to relate to them in whatever way you want to.
When we were making the film, there was never anything concrete. That’s what’s interesting about it as horror because there’s this seduction in this film, there’s a lusciousness and a seduction in a kind of hypnotic sense it where you end up leaning in towards the things that are most terrifying within yourself and also within the world.
I think this is a difficult film to talk about, and I get that sense from you guys. The refrain from much of the team is that the film raises a question. So, I’m going to ask both of you, what do you think that question is?
Kinnear: In terms of a personal response, from both reading and seeing the finished product, when you see it for the first time, there’s quite a lot of personal investment that you try to get out of the way. Seeing it last night, for the second time, was when I actually began to see the whole film as it is and as an audience might receive it rather than as an actor in it. For me, as someone who is an audience member now, rather than as the person who was involved with it— and this comes with no more authority than any other audience member might have in their response— is that inescapable nature of personal trauma and how it raises itself in so many different specters and guises. And the way that you have to take ownership of that trauma rather than suppress it, but to make sure you can live alongside it positively. That’s how it chimes with me; there are a million other ways that it might ring with others and a vast number of different themes that it touches on.
OK, Jessie, you’re the one who said this film raises a question. What do you think that question is? Or, what is it to you?
Buckley: I don’t know how to answer these things because I think they can be different at different points of your life. For me, what are recurring traumas? What are the cycles of trauma that we have within ourselves that inhibit us from being in a healthy relationship with each other? And what is the source of that wound?
The film is called “Men,” but it seems to have this conversation between men and women. Curious what your thoughts are there. To me, a lot of this movie is summed up by the final pieces of dialogue.
Buckley: With Harper, she has agency and is complicit in that she chooses to go to this house to face her own inner monsters, and as things start happening, she’s not turning away. She’s looking to face them.
Kinnear: It’s obviously part of the reason for casting the same guy to play all these different men is to explore the way and the unthinking impact that men’s behavior can have on women. But it’s a story about Harper and her response after an extraordinarily traumatic event and how she then sees men through this prism of both an abusive element of her relationship and the fatal loss of her husband. It doesn’t feel like it’s necessarily divorcing one from the other. It’s not just about examining male and female dynamics, as much as there is part of it that will recognizably chime with men and women in different ways. It may potentially offer some sense of solace from shared experience and potentially some sense of instruction for questioning one’s own behavior. But, I don’t think it’s just a political examination of gender politics.
Right, right. Every actor has the experience of making a movie and then watching it, and there are always subjective degrees of how different they are. What was it for each of you?
Kinnear: Yeah. The only thing that was kind of “the unknown” was that last sequence in terms of, you know, that would require a lot of post-production work that you weren’t going to be a party to. It was a leap of faith that these people you didn’t know were going to be handling it in the way you had presumed it would look. Those last five to ten minutes take off into something pretty extreme, so wanting to see how that turned out was probably the thing that I had the greatest expectation around.
So, if it’s like that for you, Rory, then for Jesse, do you have a “biggest surprise” of making this movie in terms of what you shot and what you see? Is it that final scene?
Buckley: I can’t even remember what I did in a film or yesterday, so I’m always pretty surprised. I watched it once by myself in a cinema, and you think, “What am I doing? This is the end. Thank you for having me, and goodnight.” [laughs] But actually watching with an audience last night and experiencing it like an audience member, what surprised me is that actually, it’s funny. There’s comedy alongside the disquieting horror, and I don’t think I’ve experienced a film like that before.
“Men” is in theaters now.
