Enys Men

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 intox­i­cat­ing sec­ond fea­ture Enys Men, which has been shot on 16mm stock that looks like it has been fes­ter­ing in the dingy 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.

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.

Cor­nish coast upon which Mary Woodvine’s unnamed botanist is liv­ing in a tum­ble­down cot­tage pow­ered by clapped-out 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 chan­nelled 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. 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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