Getting right to the point, in my opinion the movie's director is a sick bastard and this picture is disgusting. The plot looks like garbage - it doesn't manage to even explain the personalities of the main characters. The visual component is dull and poor - the number of different locations shown in the movie can be counted with fingers of one hand. The music is atrocious - I didn't like neither the main soundtrack neither other music played in the movie. The conclusion feels ambiguous and unfinished, so I didn't caught what the creators wanted to say aside from discrediting themselves.
In general, there are three kinds of movies. The movies of one, perfectly defined genre. The movies, which target to multiple genres, and do it amazingly well (not movies actually, because it is hard to switch multiple genres as fast as movie duration dictates and softly transition focus, but rather computer games and tv series), and there are movies that dissipate their energy on attaining of multiple goals and failing to reach any of them. The 'men' is a perfect example of the last group - it has elements of comedy, but it isn't funny at all, it has elements of drama, but the flow of events is too weak and boring, and there are moments of horror, but the movie in a whole is not frightening nor thrilling.
Talking about horror in particular, I detest with all my heart the contemporary director's love of body horror and their ignorance to other forms of scary movies. It seems to me that suspenseful atmosphere and proper storyline design allows to create immeasurably better pictures than showing ugly views of a bleeding body, which is always the easier way. Unfortunately, this is exactly what the movie makes its cornerstone, and that's where the most hate from me is directed towards.
If you would ask me, why am I so critical and how the movie could be done better, I would argue that, let's take the movie 'Watcher', which recently came out,. In comparison to the 'Men' the movie proposes a viewer not only a larger portion of the positive visual experience due to richer set of memorable situations and locations, but better sense of drama in general. That is because, despite of 'Men' it doesn't stand on the same point the whole story, and there is always the developing of the main characters' state of the mind, which is totally missing in the 'Men'. Let's take another example - the company A24 a few years ago created a 'Midsommar', which shares a lot of features with the 'Men', but which is slightly better because of higher number of vivid episodes and larger number of characters, which smoothed the property of the story to be overextended.
Finally, I would note that almost everything that I said here is clear even from the trailer, but yet I still decided to watch the movie. My decision is based on the highest degree of uncertainty among all the other movies that are demonstrated concurrently and the higher hope for the indie directors to make a movie, the spirit of which could not be understood just from the trailer. Unfortunately, these assumptions were unfounded and the movie failed to be not only a masterpiece, but even a picture of a meager quality. I'm sorry that instead of movies like 'Neon daemon' we get more and more pictures like 'Men', and these pictures are welcome to the international festivals and to the cinema theatres.
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