Review: Surviving 'Men'

by Jenny Anypenny, Boshemia film critic at-large.

Photo by A24

Fortunately, I went and saw this before reading any reviews or delving into any of the current discourse. I thought it was fine, and that it felt, in general, pretty self-aware of its own absurdity. There’s a story behind what we are given on screen, one that doesn’t need to be spelled out to be felt on an emotional level. 

As a woman, I found the surface of this film to be another shallow example of a male artist loudly and crudely displaying a woman’s trauma in order to showcase his own feminist 101 ideals—the typical masculine artist ego-guise that sometimes/potentially hides some deeper sense of guilt or shame at what one has perhaps released into the world as a man. 

However, my intuition led me to something deeper that exists in this film, something likely beyond the intentions and grasp of its maker. I felt that this is a film about victimhood, trauma, and guilt—the ways in which we survivors can sometimes fail to move on, projecting our worst, embodied memories onto strange men around us, but also the strange men around us truly do have the potential to be dangerous because they are men and they sniff out and exploit our vulnerability. We witness it happen before our own eyes, to our own bodies, even as others call us dramatic and unstable. We are in the double-bind of not being able to trust while having good reason not to. 

Goofy and carelessly wielded symbolism aside, this is a story about a woman learning to let go of the guilt of having survived a man. As someone who has been working through that guilt for many years, I found the finale of the film to be exhilarating and cathartic. Am I guilty of projecting my own personal narrative onto the text and analyzing it through that lens? Yes! That is what it means to experience art. 

I appreciated the experience of watching this movie. I don’t think I’ll need to see it again.