Alex Garland’s “Men”, released last year, offers a first hour of genuine chills and fun, and can be recommended. If the last half hour is a letdown, entirely due to its doomed function as explaining its preposterous premise, it is never less than watchable.

We meet Harper, played by Jessie Buckley, who was so fine in Charlie Kaufman”s “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”. Harper is being shown a village country house she has just rented, and she is delighted, as are we. The house is not large, but magnificently simple, flawlessly furnished as the never extravagant ideal of middle class taste. Her landlord, Geoffrey, played by Rory Kinnear, is a true small village Brit, about 50, whose strange mannerisms are dismissed by Harper as pure “country”.

We discover later that another of Geoffrey’a strange mannerisms is to appear as every other male Harper meets from the village, and Kinnear’s uproarious performance(s), including full frontal nudity, evoke Peter Sellers at his outrageous best.

 

 

But we notice something strange about Harper, too. As Buckley plays her, we see a young woman who knows she is sexually attractive but, by dressing in the plainest fashion, with a short sideswept hairstyle, is trying to hide it.

We soon see that the surrounding green fields and woods are even more gorgeous than the house. This is increasingly important because Harper has come to the village because she is haunted by guilt and confusion about the recent death of her husband. She needs to sort out her feelings in a calm, rural setting, which she confides to her London mate, Riley, over their face-time calls.

The precipitating event of her crisis, as shown in tantalizing memory snips, is the sight of her husband as he is falling to his death outside their apartment. They had been arguing because she wanted a divorce, it is never explained why. But he hits her, for the first time, and she is so outraged that she throws him out of the apartment, which he resists vigorously. Moments later, still upset, she glances out the window and sees him falling. She is haunted by the idea that their eyes met for a mere instant then, or is she only imagining that. This thought continues to haunt her.

She even confesses this to a local vicar she meets in a deserted church near the house. But the vicar, an even more odd duck than Geoffrey, explains that she feels guilty because she might have driven her husband to hit her, and, when she refused to forgive him, drove him to suicide. Outraged, she tells the vicar to “fuck off”.

The first hour is filled with such bits. Harper just wanders aimlessly about stunningly gorgeous vistas, spectacularly photographed by Rob Hardy, and occasions upon villagers – all men, save for a brief time with a sympathetic female police officer – who alternately insult, tease and verbally abuse her. The biggest shock is when, from a distance, she spots a powerful man, totally nude, whom she perceives as stalking her. Calling the police after locking herself in, they subdue him easily. Yet, although they know he’s deranged, release him because he “didn’t do anything wrong”.

Still, her outrage seems to hide something. Why would a traumatized woman think that spending time alone in an isolated retreat would restore her? Her reactions to these men are equally beyond belief. The village itself is a sick joke, and makes Sam Peckinpaugh’s enclave in “Straw Dogs” look like Sesame Street. Yet she doesn’t leave. As for stalking, there’s no other woman in sight anywhere! The surprise is that only one naked man chases after her.

Obviously, Garland doesn’t expect us to take this stuff seriously, and we sense that from early on. He tells us that he will skillfully seduce us into taking a journey into the mind of a woman who is haunted by her own illogical guilt over a tragedy she could do nothing to prevent, and that this is, in itself, a story worth telling. And that we will be in breathless suspense, and laughter, all the while.

It’s a ballsy concept, but I think it works. Even with the outright stupid and gory denouement, we take the chills gladly. There’s no Michael Meyers here. No real (but fictional) homicidal lunatic to be caught but – never – permanently killed. Instead, we are shown that this fictional woman is the only real victim of her self-torture, and yet we are amazed at how entertaining it is to watch. Sadistic as it is, we are Garland’s partners here.