Why culture is in the grip of a medieval revival

At the conclusion of Alex Garland’s new film, Men, Jessie Buckley is confronted by the naked stalker who has been following her throughout the film, and who is now deep in the process of transforming into the mythic figure of the Green Man. He is played, like all the men in this film bar one, by Rory Kinnear. He howls in fear and pain, buckles over, sprouts sylvan vegetation from his face, grows a vagina and gives birth to a succession of the other Rory Kinnears we have been introduced to throughout the film, in his various roles as lairy village youth, creepy local priest, landed gentry and jobsworth policeman.

The Green Man is one of those ubiquitous figures who spans pagan and Christian mythologies: an ancient symbol of the natural cycles of death and rebirth, part human, part tree, equally at home functioning as a rustic quasi-Jesus, a folkish ostentation of the Gothic Revival, or, later, as a frippery of agrarian prog rock of the likes of Jethro Tull.