Heavy-handed with its theme, metaphor, dialogue, and really everything else in a way that’s super unflattering for its writer/director and totally not indicative of the quality of the rest of his work. Maybe the most heavy-handed movie I’ve ever seen (not hyperbolizing). Which I’m sure is something that many will defend by saying things like “you need to be blunt with this message! The time for subtlety has passed if we want change!” Just as many who will be totally enraged because it’s “woke trash that says all men are evil 😤” or irritated that “oh great, another MAN is trying to tell us he understands the tragedy of the female experience 🙄” Blah blah blah. This feels like it was tailor-made to throw every side of the modern feminism/patriarchy debate into an absolute freaking TIZZY. As for the actual filmmaking craft, the entire first half seems as if Garland watched every other piece of A24 arthouse horror and copied the same style of pointless cinematic shots of scenery in an effort to convince us of Men’s depth and poignance. It totally doesn’t work and makes the whole thing come off as ungodly pretentious and, much worse, boring instead. I can definitely see why this had everyone saying “A24 has become a self-parody of itself now” for a while there.  Then there’s that disgusting final sequence before the ending that had me asking “what?” right up until it’s somewhat flat big reveal… When the flick finally gets going though, I’ve got to say it is TERRIFYING. I can’t remember when the last time I was genuinely scared like this was. That’s what I come to a horror flick for soooooo…. Plus, that means the flick is legitimately really good at getting its point across if you think about it. Hands-down Garland’s worst film to date. In a weird way I gotta give him props for being bold (or hubristic) enough to actually put something like this out though. Incredibly frustrating, but between it and Annihilation I really want to see him return to the horror genre again in the future. He’s an expert at creating messed up sights that stick in my brain.