Well Go USA
There’s no shortage of coming of age tales for young men, not in any medium, and certainly not movies. So sometimes it comes down to specificity and the underlying themes — in this case the setting is modern day Ireland and the theme is trauma and death. It is noted in the movie that more young men commit suicide in Ireland than nearly any other country in the world, but I don’t know from where this data comes. At the very least, the spectre of death hovers over everything in this story.
Here Are the Young Men comes from writer/director Eoin Macken, based on the novel of the same name by Rob Doyle. The movie ostensibly follows three young men, more decent Matthew (Dean-Charles Chapman), troubled Kearney (Finn Cole), and Rez (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) who was really barely in the movie. Anya Taylor-Joy also stars as Jen, an old friend and potential love interest for Matthew as the movie goes on.
We start things off with the three boys graduating from high school, screwing around and vandalizing school property. Kearney is more of the instigator of the bunch, but it doesn’t take much for Matthew to easily follow along. At other times the movie has people try to get Matthew to take his life seriously, but for a while he and the other two are simply going to parties and getting absurdly drunk and high.
But the first big change happens when they see a horrible car accident with a horrifying fatality. Naturally they are all immediately traumatized by it, but it’s not like any of these boys are going to therapy. Rez deals with it with self-harm and suicidal thoughts, but it’s easily forgotten since his screen time is so minor compared to everyone else’s.
More interesting is Kearney and his intentionally vague trip across the pond to America. The movie introduces an interesting concept, veiling Kearney’s awful behavior in the guise of a game show where he seems to be pressured by society to be the epitome of toxic masculinity. We return to the show a few times as the movie progresses, giving hints to the criminal acts Kearney has performed without ever saying it explicitly.
It’s hard to say if this idea ever really works completely, it’s useful to prevent potential exploitative imagery of victims by obscuring the truth, but the metaphor keeps things a bit too muddled to entirely understand what we’re supposed to be getting from Kearney’s journey. We do see enough of his toxic home life to understand more of the rage and pain he feels, as it uses it in increasingly terrible ways.
While his friends are off doing awful things, Matthew lives in a more romantic storyline, as he and Jen get closer and start dating. But things are not so simple for Matthew, who has his own issues in his mind about what a man should be and has difficulty living up to it. When all three come back together, it’s clear that things are going to go poorly once more.
It’s an interesting take on this sort of theme, and naturally Anya Taylor-Joy is a great presence as the most reasonable person in this thing. The other actors are pretty good, although many don’t have as fully featured plotlines to really show something interesting — Kearney’s plot in particular gets so metaphorical that many of the game show performances are borderline (or over the line) camp.
I think there’s an interesting attempt at specificity here, trying to point at Ireland in particular as a place of troubled youths, but I never really felt that the movie quite expanded on this point enough. It does do a decent job of connecting societal pressures and trauma with the masculine toxicity for the boys that want to be men, I just feel like it’s something that is almost there but not quite.
Planning to see Here Are the Young Men? Click below to see the movie, and be sure to come back and tell us what you thought!
Here Are the Young Men has a run time of 1 hour 36 minutes and is not rated.
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