Alex Garland Knows You Might Hate <em>Men</em>
The director’s new horror film will probably alienate some viewers, but that was a risk he was prepared to take.
Alex Garland has never shied away from unusual endings. His 2018 sci-fi film, Annihilation, adapted a mind-bending best seller and put a poetic , in which Natalie Portman performs a balletic fight with an alien copy of herself. Then he made , an inscrutable tech thriller whose conclusion unfolded over multiple parallel universes. So it’s quite telling that the writer-director seems nervous about the last act of his new horror film, , which will be released in theaters next week. “Sometimes I think, ,” Garland told me. But he added that, as a storyteller, he felt an obligation to push boundaries: “I get scared of not taking the chance that someone else is giving you, you know?”
