Enys Men [DVD + Blu-ray]

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On-stage Q&A interview with Mark Jenkin and Mary Woodvine by film critic Mark Kermode at BFI Southbank (2022) Haunters of the Deep (1984, 61 mins): a Children’s Film Foundation adventure that shares many of the same West Cornwall locations as Enys Men, and made quite an impression on its director. Jenkin’s style is so unusual, so unadorned, it feels almost like a manuscript culture of cinema. There is real artistry in it. Mark Kermode, reviewing for The Guardian, gave the film five stars calling it "a richly authentic portrait of Cornwall" and saying Woodvine's performance was "quietly mesmerising". [12] Adam Scovell, writing for BBC Culture, said that the film was "a perfect, anti-romantic expression of Cornish eeriness". [13] It is only later in Enys Men that more horrifying visions enter, and, even then, they seem abstract compared to the definite visitations of more typical horror. Sometimes these visions and atmospheres arise for only a second before vanishing, and with little indication that they were there at all. Women in traditional clothing move in unison on the cliff tops, lichen grows from an old scar on the volunteer's body, and the faces of miners peer out of the darkness of old shafts.

Haunters of the Deep (1984, 61 mins): a Children's Film Foundation adventure that shares many of the same West Cornwall locations as Enys Men, and made quite an impression on its director Jenkin has a second preoccupation alongside his analogue sensibility: the landscape and culture of his native Cornwall. While Bait was a deeply modern tale of Cornish gentrification told with old technology, Enys Men reflects that same local interest but with stronger cohesion between the old filmic form and its period setting.Enys Men is a different beast to Bait: more abstract, filmed in highly saturated colour and set in a landscape of eerie coastal moorland in the spring of 1973. The film’s star, other than Boswens, is an unnamed wildlife volunteer played by Mary Woodvine, Jenkin’s real-life partner and a familiar face in his other films. Every day, the volunteer stops to drop a stone into the murky depths of an abandoned tin mine (which I also visit en route to meet Jenkin, nearly falling off its gale-blasted foundations), then notes down her observations of a rare, curious flower growing nearby. She treks across a moor in a small island off the far west coast of Cornwall called Enys Men (pronounced ‘Ennis Main’ in Cornish and translated as ‘Stone Island’). Acclaimed independent Cornish horror feature Enys Men, from film-maker Mark Jenkin, was released earlier this month by the BFI. The low budget film was made using Jenkin’s unique workflow and is a masterclass in how to incorporate university learning into hands-on film-making. The pace here is slow and dialogue is minimal – with much of it coming via her limited interactions on a battered VHF metal maritime radio. No one is named. In addition to the Volunteer and the Girl; there’s the Boatman; the Preacher and others. Enys Men is far from plot heavy and I don’t even know how much of it I properly understood. Despite this, never for a moment was I remotely bored. Instead, I found myself consistently fascinated. Some will be left confused – even frustrated – by a narrative that slips between dreams and reality

Ella Turner, who worked as a production coordinator on the shoot and herself a graduate from Falmouth, explains: “The students showed their hard work and keenness to learn right from day one, using their initiative throughout the shoot, fitting in with all departments and always ready to help out. I loved working with the team, it’s so relieving when you can rely on someone to get on with things.”Enys Men" unfurls itself slowly, beginning as a quiet meditation on a researcher's lonesome study of nature, before slowly descending into a nightmare world where the natural landscape, figments of the researcher's imagination and/or individuals from her past (including a young woman who obliquely appears alongside her, possibly a younger version of herself), and spectral figures connected to the island's history (miners, doomed mariners, and a priest) all collide into a perverse tapestry. Even milkmaids on a tin canister of dried milk in the kitchen come to life here. In his current BFI season The Cinematic DNA of Enys Men, Jenkin juxtaposes the Cornish-set Children’s Film Foundation production Haunters of the Deep with the Australian eco-chiller Long Weekend (“their crime was against nature!”) and José Ramón Larraz’s atmospheric British psychodrama Symptoms. But it’s Lawrence Gordon Clark’s Stigma , made in 1977 as part of the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series, that offers the most intriguing touchstone, sharing with Enys Men an atmosphere of uncanny weirdness, closely aligned with the writings of MR James, or John Wyndham. Lichen appears on one of the flowers and then spreads to places you would not easily imagine. People begin to appear without any explanation. The woman looks into a bedroom and is unsurprised to see a dark-haired girl (played by Flo Crowe) sleeping there. Who is she? A younger version of herself? Her daughter? A hallucination? A ghost? Mark Jenkin isn’t a director with any inclination to spoonfeed audiences what to think.

These visions are eerie not simply because they are derived from the rural landscape but because they only intimate their presence; they are glimpsed terrors. The eerie resists revealing its horrors head on. "The mood of the eerie is lingering," Soar believes, "a sensation that is hard to shake off. The eerie doesn't deal in jump scares, but involves a nagging, troubling sense of doubt and uncertainty that colours all activities." In his essay The Weird and the Eerie (2016), the academic Mark Fisher defined eeriness as "constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence". That is, for Fisher, the eerie "occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or if there is nothing present when there should be something". Enys Men falls into the former camp, where the island should be absence made manifest, but instead provides spectres of class trauma breaking the volunteer's solitude. The local industry and its demise is the most unsettled ghost of the film. The Shining is also possibly referenced as well as the subgenre of body horror – although this element is never as nightmarish as some of the grotesquery glimpsed in David Cronenberg’s more extreme productions.Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world. a b Kiang, Jessica (27 May 2022). " 'Enys Men' Review: A Gorgeously Grainy Folk Horror Steeped in Style but Starved of Story". Variety.

Enys Men" doesn't explain itself. This may be frustrating for some. I found it compelling, not just stylistically but emotionally. It called to mind, on some level, Chantal Akerman's "Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles," in its devotion to repetition, in its patience in noticing small changes, in breaking down the routine into something strange, even threatening. There's tension in the monotony. When change comes, it drops from the sky like a menacing anvil.Set in 1973, the horror story unfolds on an uninhabited island off the Cornish coast. A wildlife volunteer’s daily observations of a rare flower take a dark turn into the strange and metaphysical, forcing both her and viewers to question what is real and what is nightmare. Is the landscape not only alive but sentient?