A MEN-Inspired Rant About A24 Horror

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 Aren't people tired of these movies yet? I think "elevated horror" is a very silly thing in itself, but some people happen to be really good at it! Jordan Peele makes great elevated horror. The 2020 "Invisible Woman" is a solid entry. "Barbarian", which was dumped by the Disney-owned corpse of Fox a few weeks ago, is a gross monster movie with plenty to say about sex, race, and capitalism. This makes it the second dumped Fox horror film to pull that off in recent years, after "Ready or Not", directed by the guys who made a decent "Scream" remake that skewered elevated horror. 

 None of these carry the A24 logo. Other than "Hereditary", I don't see anything interesting about the lot of their horror releases. It's so formulaic. An A24 horror film is going to be well shot, but probably too interested in showing off the nature of its rural setting, and aggressively in love with having the camera zoom in very slowly to simulate something spooky. It will have vaguely provocative imagery, which it uses in place of anything actually happening in its first half. I wish I meant these movies had nothing disturbing, but no, in most cases there's actually nothing happening. Gosh these movies are all obnoxiously slow. "Men" feels more guilty of that than any of their releases since 2017's "It Comes At Night". There's an awful lot of very nice nature cinematography, and no story or characters or scares until an off-the-walls final act. A24's horror films very rarely tackle actually interesting themes, usually settling for some combination of vague parental grief/trauma, lame pop-feminism, and old-timey religious nonsense. These themes are just ideas. "Hereditary" is the only instance where I felt that the ideas ever became a movie, and even that totally fails to stick its landing.

 "Men" fits firmly into the pop-feminism category, with its "all men are the same" main idea obviously telegraphed early in the film and not really developing or escalating from there. Jessie Buckley is a supremely talented actress, but she doesn't get anything to do. She does plenty of walking in a forest, she stands in a tunnel and sings out a few vowel sounds for what feels like forever, and she occasionally wails at nothing in particular. Ironically, the only thing we know about her character is that the men she knows treat her badly and don't really listen to her. One might say that it's bad form for a piece of feminist horror to not give its heroine any traits. One might say. The last half hour is bonkers, full of creepy body horror, and I liked that stuff quite a bit. I maybe would have liked the movie if it started functioning as a movie earlier. Instead, it's a boring mess, which is especially embarrassing as it's more or less covering the same thematic ground as "Ex Machina". That earlier Alex Garland film actually works as a film, and is not just a vessel to deliver twitter-and-letterboxd-approved ideas about women to a politically aware audience that surely wants something deeper.

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