Men, the latest from Ex Machina director Alex Garland, is a nightmarish, fairytale-esque folk horror, following Jessie Buckley’s Harper as she attempts to process, and move on from, a recent trauma.

Buckley is excellent in a role which asks a lot of her. She portrays strength, trauma, anger and fear all at once, without ever allowing her performance to slip into the melodramatic.

She never comes across as the damsel in distress, which is far too often the case in these kinds of films, instead she is allowed to fight back herself. The fear in her subsiding against the incandescence she feels at being constantly let down by those around her.

Naturally I can’t go into this in detail, but the final shot of the film rounds off Harper’s character arc. The journey that she has been on, the person she was, and the person she’s become, are all there, managing to be both chilling, and optimistic at the same time.

The titular men are all, with the exception of only one or two, portrayed by Rory Kinnear, who uses this opportunity to further cement himself as one of the greatest British character actors working today. Each of these characters represent a different facet of abuse - The seemingly harmless landlord, the victim blaming priest, the incel schoolboy, the openly aggressive drinker, the negligent cop… I could go on.

It has been questioned in other reviews, that Harper never points out, or seems to notice, that all of these characters look the same, which I think misses the point somewhat. In the world of the film, they don’t all look the same, but for an audience the message is clear. Once you strip away the artifice of these men, the monster lurking below, and the damage that it brings to the women they abuse, is the same.

They are all abusers. Whether they believe they are or not. The incompetent policeman who rolls his eyes when Harper tells him that she feels unsafe, may not lay a hand on her himself, but he is complicit in the cycle. He may not lay a hand on her himself, but the monster is still lurking below.

In a recent interview Rory Kinnear stated that these men have seeped out of the landscape, and this analogy is apt. These men have grown, and prospered, in an environment of misogyny. In environment which allows them to be put into figures of authority unchallenged. Rebirth is a theme throughout Men, the image of The Green Man featuring heavily, and unless something is done, unless someone takes a stand and holds these men to account, the attitudes and behaviours of them, the toxic masculinity which seeps from each of them, will be reborn. The cycle will continue.

Men’s scares come, not through easy jumps and thrills, but through the building of an atmosphere from the start. The colour palette and cinematography bring a claustrophobic feeling, the foreboding thought that there is to be no escape, despite the open Cotswolds countryside it is set in.

The score as well permeates through, almost below the surface, contributing to the sense of unease. Even a scene in which Harper, momentarily free of the shackles of her trauma, enjoys the echo in an old tunnel, despite the joy on her face as she discovers it, feels foreboding and threatening. If you listen to the track Runaway / Crash on the soundtrack, you’ll know what I mean.

Men is not an easy watch. It is a challenge which will be insurmountable for a lot of cinema goers, and one for which the Ari Aster film Midsommar (also produced and distributed by A24, who have a history of putting out interesting and atmospheric films) could be used as a tolerance yardstick.

But those who stick with it, and who can put up with the grotesque body horror in the films final act, will see a high watermark of British horror, full of great performances, and a eeriness which will creep under the skin and stay there long after the movie has ended.