All The Rory Kinnears In Men Ranked By How Much They Give Us The Creeps

Men will literally supernaturally harass a grieving woman in a small English town instead of going to therapy. Alex Garland's "Men" follows Harper (Jessie Buckley), a widow trying to heal and rediscover herself in an isolated house in the English countryside following her husband's tragic demise. She meets the home's owner Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear), an awkward but sufficiently affable gent that encourages her to relax and explore her new surroundings. The big problem: she soon draws the attention of a menacing, nude man, who is only the first of her growing set of problems as she discovers every man in the area isn't what he seems to be. Oh yeah, and every single one has the exact same face.

It's an eerie, multifaceted film that provokes a number of questions, like "what?" and "...why?" Most of all, it's a mind-bending film with a shocking ending, one chock-full of a cavalcade of creepy men threatening our protagonist. There's a lot to unpack in this complex and unsettling film, but first and foremost we're left with one crucial question with this menacing menagerie of men: which is the creepiest "Men" man?

Whenever Harper needs to get up and out of her rented home, she often takes a leisurely stroll down to the neighborhood pub. It's a full cast of characters with the occasional presence of the awkward Geoffrey, a ruff band of locals, and of course the visiting young Harper. And then there's the barkeep, last on our list of the menacing "Men" in men. It's one of the film's smaller roles but also one that both recurs and which allows Rory Kinnear to interact with himself.

Each of the various men in "Men" has their own complex vibe and set of misogynist tendencies, but of all the various characters that menace Harper the barkeep is the most innocuous. He serves Harper just the same without piling on to the myriad cuts and threats Harper receives. The barkeep is also not a major form that's used to threaten violence on Harper, though he's complacent in the face of the more subtle menaces. It's not that he's a 'good guy'... if he were, he'd surely be in another film. But against the other "Men" men? Practically angelic. 

In one of the film's bar scenes, a pair of patrons are sitting off at a table in one of the bar's darker corners. Neither looks like a particularly pleasant person, and both have relatively little by way of significant lines. One of the men, seen here, is a quiet 'gent' with short brown curled locks and an angry demeanor. In the film, he doesn't have that much to do, but he's almost certainly not the gent you want to sit down and have a beer with.

He's doesn't really do much in the film — a little mean-mugging and that's it. He's not a major source of harassment or misogyny for Harper, and he isn't a form that's utilized by the Green Man in the film's denouement to harass and attack her. In short, he's not really that creepy at all except for one singular detail: the fresh blood around his right eye, which suggests he's been recently violent. It could be anything from an accidental tumble on the pavement, to a bar fight we missed, to the late-night hobbies of a serial killer. We don't know! He's a literal bloody mystery, which makes him just a bit of a creep.

Here we're finally getting to the creeps. Remember that do-little creeper at the shadowy bar table? Remember how he has exactly one friend? That guy, who we're here calling James Blonde because he has all the elements of our favorite super-spy, is the next creepiest character in the film. In his limited screen-time, he runs while being violent, he drinks, he's British, and he gives women 'that look'... he's basically a full-fledged 007. Here he doesn't have much to say but he does leer at Harper when she arrives, and the real reason he's creepy comes towards the film's very end.

In the scene where Harper's assaulted by our chief antagonist (we'll get there), James Blonde is one of the forms it takes (albeit not one of the majors). It's this pivotal part of the attack on Harper and his key association with the Green Man that makes James Blonde enter the 'creepy' portion of our list. While he's not a major character by a longshot, here it just means that his creepier activity is a high proportion of his screen-time. His presence leaves us shaken, though not quite stirred.

We're finally out of the 'creepy extras' portion of our list and into the film's actual characters who have things like scenes, interactions, and even dialogue! When Harper is accosted by the Green Man's first form, one of the cops she regularly engages with is this unsettling speciman. At first, he seems like a normal bloke (minus the fact that he, too, is wearing the same face as everyone else), albeit one who's frustratingly unresponsive and a little belittling. He breaks the news that the menacing first form of the Green Man was let free, he's never helpful, and he doesn't really ever come across as someone who respects Harper or is concerned for her safety.

He's also a key initial form that the Green Man takes in its final act assault on Harper, which is alone enough to elevate his creep-level. What really takes the cake, however, is in the beginning of that assault — a key moment in Harper realizing something otherworldly is afoot — when she sees the officer in the yard, the lights turn off, and when they turn on he's simply gone. It's a creepy scene for sure, signaling that said unhelpful local cop is something far more sinister, and it's surely creepy that someone Harper intends to turn to for safety is quite the opposite.

Geoffrey is one of the characters we spend the most time with in "Men" (beyond, of course, our protagonist Harper). He's the owner and keeper of the home at which she stays, and he serves as the introduction to the house and area for both ourselves and Harper herself. From the get-go he's an unsettling gent, with ambiguously creepy moments that are played off like mere awkwardness (like the 'apple from the garden' scene early in the film's trailer). At the same time, for the majority of the film he seems to be an ally of sorts to Harper — evidently concerned for Harper's welfare and the safety of the house.

At the end, however, our suspicions are confirmed when Geoffrey, too, turns on Harper, as yet one more face the Green Man wears in its relentless attempt to kill Harper. The change is abrupt (though the presence of the same face as all the baddies was a pretty big hint that something was awry), which adds to Geoffrey's creep factor. That betrayal and his centrality to the film's conclusion notwithstanding, he's still only landing at the middle of the list because the final creeps vary from deeply disturbing to full-fledged terrifying. Awkward isn't quite enough to make the top of the list against such unsettling competition.

The Vicar is another treacherous role, and one that first presents himself as an ally to our besieged heroine. As she makes her way to the local church, we first see the Green Man imagery etched into said house of worship. Thinking she's alone Harper lets out a guttural yell, a long-pent-up expression of frustration that draws the Vicar's attention (unbeknownst to her). The pair chat outside the church, and despite the vicar's face-value empathy his visage alone is remarkably unsettling. The vicar wears the trappings of a religious figure with thin, arrow-straight silver hair — it's an otherworldly and uncommon look that sits uncomfortably beside the untrustworthy air of his feigned concern.

As the conversation between Harper and the Vicar unfolds, the real menace reveals itself. The veneer of his feigned empathy drops as Harper explains the trauma of her deceased husband's suicide, when the Vicar pivots to aggressively assert that Harper blames herself for the tragic suicide. It becomes clear that he, too, blames her. Getting Harper to let her guard down, then angrily weaponizing a deep-seated trauma and fear that Harper has been distancing herself from hits an incredibly creepy tone. The Vicar is also a major form that the Green Man takes in its attack on Harper. This, combined with his unique in his ability to get under her skin on a personal and emotional level, makes the Vicar easily one of the creepiest characters in the film.

As far as the ordinary creepy men are in "Men," it's certainly difficult to top the Vicar with his odd silver hair and ability to unearth your greatest fears and use them against you ... but our next character did just that. While at the church, Harper first encounters an odd boy, Samuel (Rory Kinnear and Zak Rothera-Oxley) wearing a plastic mask of a woman's face. He wants to play hide-and-seek, but Harper is understandably in no mood to hide. Instantly the odd boy turns on her with foul language and major aggression, a personality shift that's surely unsettling. Did I forget to mention that this supposed child also has Rory Kinnear's very adult face? 

If a foul-mouth misogynist man in the body of a boy with a man's face isn't unsettling enough, he's also a major form that the Green Man takes in his final assault on Harper. At that point, the clearly supernatural non-child is something far older and beyond our understanding but just as full of hateful misogynist malice. In any other film, the Man-Faced Boy (as I'm calling him because, well, it's clearly his definitive creepy attribute and I can't remove it from my nightmares) would be the creepiest character bar none, but this is "Men" we're talking about. The weird stuff just started, so there are two creepier characters.

At the very final moments of the film's end, a wounded Green Man enters Harper's rented abode once more after a failed attempt to kill her once and for all. Now reduced to a slow slog, the wounded Green Man proceeds to slowly approach Harper in the house. In the course of chasing after her, it stops with a growing pregnant belly... and a visible vagina. Suddenly, the current form gives birth to another visage of the various men whose forms the "Green Man" has taken. It continues chase, each time periodically stopping to give birth to another, still wounded variant of the Green Man's many treacherous forms. Each version is more desperate and weaker than the last, and the Green Man leaves a trail of skin, blood, and fluid in a continuous streak across the floor.

It's a shocking and haunting, grotesque image that showcases the Green Man's myriad forms and the lack of accordance it has with any natural thing we've ever seen. It's a complete perversion of the magic of childbirth, and I can't think of much that's creeper than a bloody trail of misogynist men inexplicably giving birth to variations of themselves in a last-ditch effort to kill a woman.  It's an extremely unnatural and difficult image to shake. There's only one thing that tops it.

While what's actually going on in "Men" isn't fully explained, the key to understanding it is the "The Green Man," an archetypal character mysteriously carved into many old churches and locales throughout the U.K.. The folkloric character is an image of a man surrounded by foliage (seen in "Men"). Here, however, this figure is unexpectedly real... and dangerous. Harper first encounters the Green Man while singing notes into a long, dark, echoey tunnel. At the other end, an off-putting nude man stands up. It's that same man that continues to follow Harper, and he continues to threaten and cajole her ... and that's before his transformations. As the film comes along, he embeds leaves and natural elements in his body to increasingly reveal himself as the folkloric entity.

The Green Man is the 'thing' behind the various misogynist men in "Men," capable of taking so many forms that each have a murderous misogyny inherent in nearly every one of their actions. It's shifting forms, ability to withstand inhuman amounts of damage, and the fact that its deep and obsessive malice is embedded to varying degrees in every man in the movie add to its already considerably creepy personage. What's most unsettling is that the Green Man character isn't threatening Harper from innate hunter instincts (like so many monsters) or as an impersonal byproduct of our irrelevance in its affairs (like cosmic horror gods or the titans of the Monsterverse), but from a very personal, wholly misogynistic, supernatural-powered obsessive hatred that's never fully explained. He's easily the creepiest creep that ever creeped in any of his chosen forms, and the source of the creepiness of every other entry, easily topping our list.