Using the rugged coastal landscape of his native Cornwall as a key character, British director Mark Jenkin puts an experimental lo-fi spin on vintage folk-horror tropes in this highly atmospheric, visually arresting second feature. Enys Men, which translates as “stone island” in the ancient Celtic language of Cornish, builds on the wilfully analogue visual grammar of Jenkin’s feted debut Bait (2019), which earned him a BAFTA, festival prizes and gushing reviews. Eerily beautiful and beautifully eerie, this latest deep dive into the Twilight Zone already has a strong claim on being the most mind-bending trip to premiere in Cannes this year.
Commendably, Jenkin resists the temptation to move in a more mainstream direction in the wake of his buzzy debut, instead choosing to further explore the uncompromising hand-made auteur grammar that is uniquely his own as director, cinematographer, editor, sound designer and score composer. Screening in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar at the prestige French festival, Enys Men will probably reach a wider audience than Bait due to its higher profile and genre-friendly trappings. It is ultimately a more wilfully cryptic, disorienting, sense-scrambling work, but its horror-adjacent tone sits well within its lightly avant-garde aesthetic. Neon picked up North American rights ahead of Cannes, with the BFI handling UK distribution.
Like Jenkin’s previous films, Enys Men is a heavily stylised audio-visual collage which was shot on a vintage Bolex 16mm cine-camera, the footage then hand-processed to give it a scratchy, scuffed, antique texture. All audio elements were overdubbed afterwards, with minimal dialogue and strong emphasis on sound design to create a kind of hissing, crackling, musique concrete effect. But in contrast to the monochrome Bait, which felt like a homage to the silent movie era in places, this vivid folk tale blazes with saturated colours that lend it a radiant, grainy, flickering look. The narrative is also much more fragmentary here, slowly unravelling into a hallucinatory fugue suggestive of a mind in meltdown.
Jenkin regular Mary Woodvine plays the lead role here as an unnamed woman simply called “The Volunteer”, an amateur botanist living in a lonely cottage on a remote, rocky, fictional island off the coast of Cornwall. Cut off from the mainland, with just a crackly two-way radio for communication and a petrol-powered generator to provide intermittent power, her main daily task involves monitoring a cluster of rare flowers growing on the island’s windswept cliffs. From her handwritten journals, we glean that the year is 1973.
Aside from infrequent supply deliveries from a gruff boatman (Bait co-star Edward Rowe), The Volunteer initially appears to live alone on the island. Her daily routine mostly follows a hypnotic, repetitive rhythm, from dropping stones down the shaft of an abandoned tin mine to reading ecological textbooks by candlelight in bed. But it soon becomes evident that other entities haunt this extra-terrestrial landscape, unquiet spirits from the past, miners and milkmaids, hellfire preachers and long-drowned sailors. A sullen young woman (Flo Crowe) appears sporadically at the cottage, perching perilously on the roof. The striking runic stone columns that dot the island also begin behaving strangely, moving around like unquiet spirits disturbed from their prehistoric slumber.
Wary of giving over-explicit narrative pointers, Jenkin keeps us guessing whether these apparitions are ghosts, feverish visions or paranormal events. But the director’s Cannes press notes contain a few clues, drawing on superstitious local folklore from his Cornish childhood about wayward maidens who were turned into stone columns by malevolent spirits. First they were afraid, then they were petrified. The director also draws on the prescient eco-anxiety of the 1970s, and “block universe theory”, which essentially suggests that past, present and future all co-exist across four-dimensional space. This concept helps explain why The Volunteer appears to be haunted by historical figures, and possibly by younger versions of herself, although Jenkin throws little light on how or why this may be happening.
Enys Men riffs knowingly on the pulpy aesthetic of 1970s British folk-horror, a stylistic niche already fruitfully explored by other contemporary British directors, notably Ben Wheatley and Peter Strickland. While Jenkin insists he is not paying explicit homage to this cult-friendly subgenre, he concedes that using some of the same vintage techniques and equipment inevitably create echoes. He cites Jerzy Skolimowski’s left-field psycho-thriller oddity The Shout (1978) as inspiration, but the time-bending occult psychodramas of Nicolas Roeg are another clear touchstone too. Indeed, The Volunteer’s bright red coat feels like a direct visual homage to Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), released the same year that Enys Men is set. The film’s horror elements, Jenkin claims, lie “in the form and not necessarily in the content.”
Working fast with a small team of regular collaborators, Jenkin may favour guerrilla-cinema methods, but he also composes his films with great formal rigour, working raw 16mm material into a meticulous musical montage of percussive jump cuts, jarring juxtapositions and visual loops. The audio track of Enys Men is thickly layered with hiss and crackle, airy birdsong and moaning wind, mournful drones and radio static. This isle is full of noises.
The otherworldly terrain of Jenkin’s native Cornwall is a gift to any visual artist, serving here as savagely beautiful backdrop, nightmarish dreamscape and handy source of exotic alien flora, which feature in recurring close-up. Assembled with an unashamedly impressionistic eye, Enys Men may leave some viewers feeling short-changed after the relatively conventional narrative arc of Bait. But it works fine as a symphony of spooky hints and uncanny echoes, an immersive sensory journey into the deep substrata of pagan weirdness that runs just below every wind-blown rock and twisted tree on England’s wilder western fringes.
Director, screenwriter, cinematographer, sound, editing, music: Mark Jenkin
Cast: Mary Woodvine, Edward Rowe, Flo Crowe, John Woodvine
Producer: Denzil Monk
Production design: Joe Gray, Mae Voogd
Production company: Bosena (UK)
World sales: Protagonist Pictures
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Directors’ Fortnight)
In English, Cornish
90 minutes
