metaphors

There is a lot scientists still don’t know about the female reproductive system. They don’t know enough about how to treat the most common vaginal infection, bacterial vaginosis. They don’t have good solutions for many people suffering from endometriosis, a common and sometimes incredibly painful condition where tissue similar to what grows inside the uterus grows elsewhere in the body. They still have a lot of questions about what menopause does to a body. So a few years ago, Rachel Gross, a science reporter who…

Dir: Alex Garland. Starring: Jessie Buckley, Rory Kinnear, Paapa Essiedu, Gayle Rankin. 15, 100 minutes.Alex Garland’s new horror film Men is a trippy exercise in self-flagellation, a bloody folktale meditating on male malevolence. It frames men as an ancient, insurmountable evil and misogyny as a bogeyman of unknowable origin. Certainly, that sounds damning (I can already hear hands revving up over computer keyboards, quaking with indignation), but who does Men’s broad-brush statement actually serve? For all its…

In the new Alex Garland thriller Men, Jessie Buckley plays a woman whose holiday in the English countryside curdles into a surreal nightmare. Her tormenter is at once singular and plural: a whole village of hostile strangers, all with the face and voice of Rory Kinnear. Garland, the sci-fi novelist who wrote and directed Ex Machina and Annihilation (both likewise fixated, to some degree, on questions of gender), never explains the nature of this menacing anomaly, this apparent hive mind of identical stalkers. But anyone…