10 Recent Horror Movies That Broke All The Rules
4. Men (2022)
Rule Break: Turns trauma into myth, and every man into the same man - literally.
Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation) doesn’t do straightforward, and Men is probably his most enigmatic, divisive horror yet. On the surface, it starts conventionally enough: a grieving woman, Harper (played with quiet intensity by Jessie Buckley), escapes to a quiet countryside manor following the traumatic death of her husband. But what unfolds is anything but familiar.
The men in this sleepy village - all played by Rory Kinnear in increasingly grotesque variations - aren’t just creepy, they’re symbolic, representing different shades of toxic masculinity and inherited male violence across generations. And Garland doesn’t tiptoe around metaphor - he shoves you into it.
The final act? It breaks every rule of modern horror storytelling by ditching coherence for body horror surrealism, culminating in an extended, almost comically grotesque birthing sequence that has to be seen to be believed (and even then, good luck explaining it). There's no final chase, no monster reveal, just an eerie, mythological spiral into Harper’s inner reckoning.
Men isn’t here to be easy or traditionally scary, it’s here to provoke, unsettle, and dare you to make sense of it. Whether you love it or hate it, you’ll definitely have an opinion by the end.