2022 • United Kingdom
Alex Garland’s Men (2022) sends Harper, played by Jessie Buckley, to an idyllic country retreat after the violent death of her husband and then makes the countryside itself feel increasingly untrustworthy. What begins as grief, guilt and attempted solitude turns into something stranger as every man she meets seems to wear a variation of Rory Kinnear’s face.
For FolknHell, the real argument is not whether the film has folk horror imagery. It absolutely does. Green Man carvings, fertility figures, an isolated village, woodland menace and ancient-looking symbols are scattered everywhere. The more interesting question is whether any of that makes Men folk horror, or whether Garland is simply borrowing the old furniture to decorate a very modern psychological nightmare. The episode also gets stuck into the film’s deliberately heavy allegory, that extraordinary cascade of rebirths, and whether saying something loudly is the same thing as saying it well.
Harper retreats alone to a large country house after the death of her husband, James, whose fall from their London flat followed an abusive argument and his threat to kill himself if she left him. She wants distance, quiet and enough time to begin processing what happened.
Instead, the village offers a succession of increasingly unsettling men: an awkward landlord, a policeman, a vicar, a schoolboy and a naked stranger from the woods, all played by Rory Kinnear. Their behaviour shifts from patronising and peculiar to threatening, accusatory and surreal.
As Harper’s isolation deepens, the boundaries between physical danger, memory and psychological trauma begin to collapse. Ancient carvings in the local church, including the Green Man and fertility imagery, start to echo through what she experiences, until the film abandons ordinary reality almost completely and turns Harper’s confrontation with male blame into something grotesquely literal.
Mostly no, although David Hall was reluctant to throw it out of the churchyard entirely.
The film certainly looks like folk horror in places. Harper is isolated in the countryside, the village feels dreamlike and faintly hostile, the Green Man becomes a recurring presence, and ancient fertility imagery gives the film a sense that the conflict it is exploring is far older than the people currently enacting it. David described it as folk horror with a very light wash of folk horror, and was understandably resistant to the increasingly useful but increasingly slippery phrase “folk horror adjacent”.
Andy and Dave landed more firmly on the other side. The old symbols are doing valuable work, but they are primarily cultural shorthand inside Harper’s psychological struggle. The village is not really a community with its own inherited customs or belief system, the land is not the true source of the threat, and there is no ritual structure driving the story in the way FolknHell usually expects.
So the FolknHell verdict is: not really folk horror, but deliberately and effectively dressed in its imagery. Folk horror fans will recognise plenty of familiar shapes in the woods, even if the thing wearing them belongs to a different species of nightmare.
Trauma, guilt and blame The episode repeatedly returns to the idea that the film is taking place as much inside Harper’s emotional landscape as outside it. Her husband’s death leaves her carrying guilt that the men around her continually prod, reshape and hand back to her. The horror is less “something is in the woods” than “something has followed her into every room”.
Every man is the same man Rory Kinnear playing nearly every male figure makes the allegory impossible to miss. Landlord, policeman, vicar, child and intruder become different faces of a single pressure. It is effective symbolism, but it also contributes to Dave’s feeling that the film never quite behaves like a real situation with genuine jeopardy.
The Green Man and fertility imagery The church carvings are the clearest folk horror signal. The Green Man, birth imagery and the film’s repeated concern with bodies opening, producing and reproducing connect Harper’s personal trauma to something older and cultural. FolknHell saw these symbols as meaningful, but not enough to turn the entire film into folk horror.
The countryside as a mental landscape One of the strongest readings in the episode is that the house and village function like extensions of Harper’s head. The beautiful surroundings offer apparent sanctuary, but the longer she stays, the more distorted and invasive they become. Even the pastoral escape has nowhere for her to hide.
Allegory versus emotion This is where the hosts divide most sharply. David responded strongly to the story and what it was trying to say. Dave found the overt allegory distancing, arguing that once everything feels symbolic, some of the emotional jeopardy drains away. Garland’s film gives the audience plenty to interpret, but occasionally appears determined to mark its own homework.
Birth, rebirth and the ending The notorious succession of births turns the film’s ideas about male aggression, repetition and inherited behaviour into body horror. It is memorable, revolting and, for some of the panel, far too prolonged. The final encounter with James was read less as reconciliation than Harper finally confronting and releasing the guilt attached to him.
Men is an ambitious, beautifully made and deliberately uncomfortable film with a terrific Jessie Buckley performance holding together its increasingly surreal descent. Rory Kinnear’s multiple roles give the central idea a wonderfully uncanny face, while Garland’s imagery offers enough Green Men, strange carvings and rural unease to keep folk horror viewers happily suspicious of every hedgerow.
The problem is that subtlety eventually leaves by the same door as conventional reality. The final stretch explains the metaphor with such physical enthusiasm that viewers who already understood the point may feel they are being shown the PowerPoint again, only this time everyone is giving birth.
FolknHell did not entirely agree on how well that approach works, but the discussion lands in roughly the same place on genre. Men is not really folk horror. It uses folk horror imagery as part of a psychological and cultural argument about trauma, misogyny, guilt and recurring male violence.
Worth watching? Yes, particularly if you like horror that demands interpretation and are happy for symbolism to sit in the driving seat. Just do not expect the Green Man to provide a tidy route back out of the woods.
How each host rated this film