Alex Garland, the filmmaker behind Ex Machina and Annihilation, is back with a new film called Men starring current Oscar nominee Jessie Buckley and Rory Kinnear, and virtually ONLY Jessie Buckley and Rory Kinnear. The trailer features Buckley as Harper, a grieving woman gone to the country after, it seems, her husband dies by suicide. I May Destroy You’s Paapa Essiedu is the only other person in the trailer, and only seen very briefly. Otherwise, it’s just Buckley as Harper, surrounded by a cohort of men all played by Rory Kinnear. IMDb says that GLOW’s Gayle Rankin is also in the film, but here’s one way to work around pandemic limitations—just cast one exceptionally good actor to play all the parts.
Kinnear is a regular on British television, and international audiences probably know him best as the stoic Tanner in the Craig-era Bond films, but he is a GREAT stage actor, particularly of the Shakespearean canon, though his debut play as a writer, The Herd, is contemporary. I saw it at Steppenwolf in 2015 and it’s very good. I also very much enjoyed Kinnear as the father-son Badminton duo on Our Flag Means Death, where he got to ham it up with just the right touch of villainy. So glad to see he’s finally having A Moment outside Britain. But, back to this trailer, which is creepy and weird, as we should now expect from Alex Garland. I guess you could call this “elevated horror”, as there is some kind of monster-man chasing Harper around and overall upsetting vibes, and maybe this is all an allegory for grief. There is also the de-aged, shrunk-down boy played by Kinnear, which reminds me of the upcoming “inspired by” biopic of Not Celine Dion, Aline, and also kind of looks like Baby Annette. Horrifying, indeed.
