You know you're in for a rollercoaster in the reviews when a third of them are feminist screeds and another third are MRA tantrums.

So, to avoid spending too much time here, let me just lay down some real.

1. This is a mockumentary. It's pushing exactly no agenda. It has nothing it wants you to do or enlist in. The point of this exercise is to make you think about some big topics while also making you laugh. (Although that apparently doesn't work on butt-hurt ax-grinders.)

2. Every line in this movie is a joke. EVERY LINE. If you took a single one of them as advocacy, you're a moron. If you thought the women came off looking "correct" while the men were all dopes, or the men were all "correct" while the women were sitcom stereotypes -- you're half wrong. (The "correct" half.)

3. The movie is genius. Watching it, I really wanted to use it as discussion fodder for a class on gender politics, or social problems, or cultural assumptions. It would drive the students crazy though because I'd be stopping it every 5 seconds to point out the jokes, and what the writers were harpooning with them. Since I'm a man, I mostly noticed the way they undermined us with vaudevillian call-backs to 50s-sitcom tropes. Example: the dazed brother who wanders out of his "sanctuary" hoping to meet girls, and after proving about as adept at that as most of us, winds up treed and darted exactly like a lost cougar, right down to the plummeting body. I laughed for 10 minutes. And yes, the unspoken reference to cougars is intended. They're talking about the mean little Main Street morality we weaponise to stick our pointy little noses uninvited up others' crotches, whether it's women who date younger, or awkward would-be pickup artists.

4. Most of the jokes here are that kind. You have to be well-informed, paying attention, and not trying to win some "case" in your head. A few of them stand on your chest -- the global sorority synching up, requiring a worldwide three-day retreat every month to prevent global PMS riots; the male hunger-strike that ends after 24 hours because "Hey, we got hungry!" ('Nother pause for another ten-minute laugh.) But there are also very subtle, straight-faced what-ifs, if you're watching closely. No digital cameras in this world; the new female regime isn't technologically helpless, but neither is it performing to bi-gender spec. And male creativity is greatly curtailed. Without women to write songs about, to dress for, to build homes for, to paint and sculpt, to keep us honest and on-task, to please and fence with, our "sanctuaries" become immense fraternities. Our heroics are gone. So is our discipline. So is our ambition. We look, and act, sleepy and slovenly.

I was bowled over by the sheer density of the commentary in No Men, the relentless torrent of brain-candy. You could discuss any twenty seconds of this movie for hours. It isn't all soft and cute -- like all human beings, many women, once placed in a dominant position, become arrogant jackasses. And in spite of the comeuppance they've received, many men still fail to get it. "Oh, so this is what it's like. Well, damn. What were we thinking?" Some brothers just can't chamber that insight, even when it's dumped in their laps.

So here: if you're fuming over this clever and thoroughly enjoyable little sociology experiment, why don't you just watch it again, and this time try not to be one of the two sad cases in the paragraph above?

Considering it's a fake documentary-style movie, it's somewhat fun.

Men are obsolete. In the 1950s women start to get pregnant on their own, and give birth only to girls. The world doesn't need men anymore. This isn't the only bad news for males. An uptight, extreme and conservative female coalition is in power, and payback is harsh. The few remaining men are locked up in "sanctuaries" and darted with tranquilizers if they dare to leave. Their food is laced with estrogen to keep them docile. Menstral cycles are synchronized and the world becomes one big sorority house. At 37 years old Andrew is the youngest man in the world. He is a fluke and anomaly, born when women are giving birth solely to girls. He has a permit to leave the sanctuary and live as a domestic worker with the family of Terra and Iris. When Iris starts a relationship with Andrew, the two create a media firestorm. As with Alice in Wonderland, Gulliver's Travels and other satires, this alternative history and mockumentary helps us step outside of ourselves and see the world from a different perspective.

It is enlightening as well as hilarious, and slightly scary and unsettling, to imagine this role reversal. Who would have thought a professor of men's history would ever be needed?! While the film is limited in terms of depth, funding and acting, I thoroughly enjoyed the out-of-the-box thinking and puns about human nature. It is good that this is just a fantasy (and yet I know a few women who would like this world to happen, at least for men who don't instantly agree with them). Seen at the Toronto International Film Festival 2015.