Enys Men

Bouncing between experimental horror and a retro throwback to 1970s era horror and parodic excess, Mark Jenkin’s mind-bending horror opus Enys Men works best as a moody chamber piece that submerges the viewer with phantasmal abstractions, haunting imagery, and sensory sound design in this folk-style tale of a woman who goes through daily routines and rituals that lead her down a journey of visual hallucinations and psychological dismay.

A dedicatedly surrealist, fascinating, and nostalgic throwback to many great horror films from the 1970s in terms of aesthetics, pacing, and tone. The films that come to mind are Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, Robert Altman’s Images, and the work and style of Nicholas Roeg, with editing styles and motifs certainly influenced by Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. There is a lot of visual repetition too—so many that you see many of the same images recycle over and over, just as avant-garde cinema often does. Jenkins sophomore feature follow-up to his 2019 film Bait, conjures up direct influences that blur the line between homage and imitation. Jenkin’s own cinematography is shot superbly on Super 16mm, and it adds an effectiveness to the film that feels both woozy and eerie.

Courtesy  Neon 

The film’s setting is on a coastal island of Cornwall in England, an old site of a mining community where a woman referred to in the credits as “The Volunteer” (Mary Woodvine) appears to be on an excursion each day on the island, and she surveys the daily progress each day, takes the soil temperature, drops a few stones into an underground mine-shaft, and returns to home to record her observations, where she continues to write “No change” in the journal.

Soon, the film takes on a rhythmic structure that reflects the woman’s ritual, which bounces between sacrament, obsession, and illusion. “The Volunteer” continues to have startling visions of a young woman (Flo Crowe), who always appears at the top of the cottage just waiting to jump onto a glass ceiling. From time to time, we hear a voice statically speaking on a shortwave radio, and throughout the film, we see visions of a priest, a fisherman, female pilgrims, and some 19th-century miners that could be fragments of the protagonists’ dreams or spirits, or perhaps both, to compensate for internal feelings or guilt. Our protagonist might be alone on the physical island, but she is surrounded by spiritual appearances that invoke a foreboding anxiety throughout.

Courtesy Neon 

Enys Men is a type of film that wears its visuals and craftsmanship happily on its sleeve with its striking imagery—shot on 16mm—with scratches on the print, film grain, and visually arresting magic-hour glow, where the shots of nature, the sun, and waves add to the film’s eeriness and etherealness. Meanwhile, it’s not all style over substance either, as the film unspools with an unnerving impact. Open to a wide array of interpretations, I can’t exactly explain what each abstraction or motif possibly means, but every frame, composition, and sound design lures you in with its hypnotic pull. There are certainly visual motifs of time and themes of the cycle of life on display in the film, and Jenkins visually shows through hallucinations how our traumas will forever carry on within our psyche and consciousness. Perhaps I need to know more Cornish folktales, but there could certainly be some religious allegory interspersed throughout about temptation and desire as Jenkin’s reveals macabre fragments of the protagonists’ memories that include a drowning, a suicide, and fornication. With that, the film begins to lose creative momentum and rehashes a lot of its motifs and style near the end. Luckily, the film’s swift pacing and 90-minute running time prevents it from being tedious.

Enys Men can be interpreted as a woman attempting to unwind from a mental breakdown, but it can also be a portrait of mental disquietude. The film can also be viewed as an exploration of atonement and guilt The film can also be a mourning love letter to Cornwall, a land with a past of industry where the spirits of miners and its citizens are trapped in purgatory as the past, present, and future remain one. Projections aside, there are certainly conflicting tones of the supernatural and surreal, and it succeeds as a relentless reminder of how Jenkins is capable of putting a spin on the retro while never losing his verve for the bizarre and the macabre. The film is certainly destined for repeating watches and its a cult classic in the making.

Enys Men opens in Limited Theaters on Friday March 31st and starts Friday 4/7 at Cinema Detroit.