Enys Men – first-look review

There’s a cliché about being able to com­pre­hend a person’s expe­ri­ence by look­ing at the topog­ra­phy of their hands. The crevices, folds and scars serve to indi­cate the toils and strug­gles of life. The same might be said of film stock, where the crisp, wipe-clean sheen of the dig­i­tal image sig­ni­fies a life of fan­cy-free charms, while the blem­ish­es and imper­fec­tions of cel­lu­loid sug­gest a cer­tain lev­el of strain and dura­bil­i­ty. It’s eas­i­er to glean an added lay­er of tex­ture from cel­lu­loid than it is for dig­i­tal, like signs of his­to­ry beyond the film’s creation.

Which makes sense when dis­cussing Mark Jenkin’s intrigu­ing and intox­i­cat­ing sec­ond fea­ture Enys Men, which has been shot on 16mm stock that looks like it has been fes­ter­ing in the cor­ner of a lab for many, many decades. The film is very much a the­mat­ic con­tin­u­a­tion from his laud­ed 2019 debut, Bait, in that it extrap­o­lates and expands upon the idea of con­flict­ing worlds exist­ing in the same geo­graph­i­cal space.

In that ear­ly film, it was the con­tem­po­rary notion of the insid­i­ous gen­tri­fi­ca­tion of Cor­nish fish­ing vil­lages, and how that process encroached on age-old local tra­di­tion. With Enys Men, Jenkin has opt­ed for a sto­ry whose ghosts – here rep­re­sent­ing a fall­en island com­mu­ni­ty – are depict­ed in a more lit­er­al fash­ion. Yet this man­ner of rep­re­sen­ta­tion stern­ly refus­es to yield to con­ven­tion, whether that’s through the small parcels of con­text Jenkin sup­plies, or the bold ways in which these appari­tions appear on screen.

We’ll come to Mary Woodvine’s extra­or­di­nary cen­tral per­for­mance in a bit, but first it’s worth attempt­ing to place Enys Men onto a wider map of image-based media. Those look­ing for some gener­ic com­part­men­tal­i­sa­tion might opt to refer to this as ​“folk hor­ror”, in the mode of Britain’s most promi­nent prop­a­ga­tor of those sto­ries, Ben Wheat­ley. Its dizzy­ing, strobe-like edit­ing and dis­cor­dant sound design – plus the use of red as a sym­bol­ic accent colour – make this feel like an antecedent of Nicholas Roeg’s goth­ic clas­sic, Don’t Look Now.

Yet its most fruit­ful cul­tur­al touch­stone is the MR James ghost sto­ry ​‘Whis­tle and I’ll Come to You’, par­tic­u­lar­ly the mas­ter­ful­ly terse 1968 BBC adap­ta­tion star­ring the great Michael Hordern. Both sto­ries share the motif of a lone, pos­si­bly eccen­tric aca­d­e­m­ic head­ing out into the rugged wilder­ness and, in their wan­der­ings and research, acci­den­tal­ly dis­turb­ing some kind of spec­tral being which returns to haunt them in strange ways.

Enys Men refers to the name of an aban­doned island off the Cor­nish coast upon which Mary Woodvine’s unnamed botanist is liv­ing in a tum­ble­down cot­tage pow­ered by gen­er­a­tor. Every day in the morn­ing, she dons her red cagoule, trudges the dirt tracks towards a rocky verge, and stud­ies a crop of white flow­ers by mea­sur­ing the tem­per­a­ture of the soil around them.

On her way back home, she walks by a tur­ret next to an open mine­shaft, and whether through sus­pi­cion or just curi­ous habit, drops a stone down there and waits to hear the sound of it splash­ing in the water below. She repeats this jour­ney every day, with nary a flick­er of emo­tion vis­i­ble on her pur­pose­ly inscrutable vis­age. The rigour of Woodvine’s per­for­mance is admirable, as is the hyp­not­ic man­ner in which she intones the film’s few lines of dia­logue, as if the words were being chan­neled from some alter­na­tive meta­phys­i­cal plane.

With the dra­mat­ic rules estab­lished, Jenkin slow­ly but steadi­ly begins to intro­duce small fis­sures into the rou­tine. Like the film stock itself, this sim­ple task becomes more com­pli­cat­ed with all these minia­ture intru­sions which, in turn, draw the woman’s mind away from her work and towards some­thing more inscrutably per­son­al. And that’s when the weird stuff starts to happen.

If there’s one crit­i­cism with the film, it’s that it per­haps doesn’t devel­op its sto­ry and char­ac­ters quite far enough. We arrive at a cer­tain point, and then just stop. You’re left to swirl in the audio-visu­al tumult while you’re watch­ing the film, but there are per­haps too many ellipses and cards-kept-close-to-chest to make for a ful­ly sat­is­fy­ing expe­ri­ence. There are allu­sions to the woman’s past and present, but noth­ing that is shown in enough detail to forge a sig­nif­i­cant emo­tion­al con­nec­tion with her.

That said, Enys Men is a tech­ni­cal tour de force, and clear­ly must have kept Jenkin and his crew locked to their Steen­beck bay for many long days and nights. The heady rush of sound and visu­als pro­vide their own unique­ly absorb­ing effect, and there’s enough sub­tle vari­a­tion in the plot to retain engage­ment through­out. Unlike Wheat­ley and fel­low Brit cohort of weird­ness, Peter Strick­land, Jenkin doesn’t opt for a full ASMR psy­che­del­ic freak­out finale, instead build­ing to an intense and obscure crescen­do and then just pulling down the end credits.

In ambi­tion, achieve­ment and Jenkin’s future as an image-mak­er of eso­teric esteem, this is a big step up from Bait.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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