On an uninhabited island, a wildlife volunteer records the daily growth of a rare flower. Yet as her rigid routine slowly deteriorates, past, present and psyche begin to coalesce in Enys Men, Mark Jenkin’s windswept fever dream.
★★★★✰
With his sophomore feature, Cornish writer-director Mark Jenkin could have been forgiven for simply attempting to replicate what made Bait (2019) such an unexpected success. For all its formal radicality, a marked political urgency—tinged with genuine humour—lay at the heart of Jenkin’s debut. The idiosyncrasies of small-gauge, post-synchronised production never concealed the central drama: a small fishing village reckoning with its inevitable gentrification. Thereby, Jenkin always left more than enough narrative and thematic line to help the audience haul Bait ashore. Enys Men, conversely, provides no such slack.
April, 1973. The Volunteer (Mary Woodvine) is the singular, unnamed inhabitant of a remote island off the Cornish coast. Enys Men (pronounced ‘main’, Cornish for ‘Stone Island’) is picturesque and desolate in equal measure; a spare beauty emanates from the dark, craggy rockfaces. We learn that the Volunteer is a wildlife researcher, measuring the temperature and subsequent growth of a rare flower. Her daily routine nears ritual: every morning she drops a stone down an old mine shaft; every noon she makes tea; every evening she reads ‘A Blueprint For Survival’.
In such complete isolation, however, the mind can begin to play distortive tricks. Subtle disruptions start to upset the Volunteer’s habits: she misses the mine shaft; she runs out of tea; and, most significantly, lichen begins to grow on her rare flower. Simultaneously, Jenkin begins to insert small disparities into the film itself. As a bird dives into the sea, we hear a glass smashing. Just for a moment, we see the Volunteer lying down by her flower, inexplicably surrounded by maidens, before returning to the main ‘action’. These moments of audio-visual fragmentation forebode what is to come; a more audacious extension of Bait’s play with narrative time-slips.
As the film slides between tenses with increasing frequency, the Volunteer likewise seems caught between present events and an imagined past. A young girl (Flo Crowe) suddenly appears in the Volunteer’s ivy-covered cottage—her daughter? A younger self? Jenkin certainly offers no immediate answer and only implies a possible solution much later. The enigmatic Boatman, played by Bait star Edward Rowe, exudes a similarly spectral quality. Whilst ostensibly on the island to deliver fuel, there is also a carnal—or perhaps romantic—reason for his presence. These figures occupy the phantasmagorical space between history, reality and fantasy, materialising only momentarily before they are carried away by the island winds.
Ominously looming over this unfolding psychodrama is the imposing menhir at the very centre of Enys Men. The Volunteer’s crackling radio—her only form of communication—informs us it was erected as a ‘monument of grief’ for those who have been lost to the sea. The menhir thus functions as both a memorial to and a physical extension of the past; a stony conduit to those who shaped the island and modern Cornwall. Again, Jenkin complicates temporal boundaries as apparitions of the past—underground miners, drowned fisherman, the aforementioned Bal maidens—increasingly haunt the Volunteer.
So—just what is going on in Enys Men? Attempting to outline an intelligible plot after the first viewing is much like trying to describe colour: words actually further obfuscate the experience. What is certain, however, is that Jenkin is not simply re-treading the path he so effectively walked with Bronco’s House (2015) or Bait. Firmly rejecting the second precept of his SLDG13 manifesto, Enys Men marks Jenkin’s first feature shot in colour. A medley of saturated reds, yellows and greens provide the film with a real vibrancy, counterpointing the grainy texture of Jenkin’s beloved 16mm to produce what looks like a long-lost, washed-up analogue artefact.
Furthermore, whereas Bait seemed forever on the precipice of tipping into full-blown horror, Enys Men does indulge in some brief but explicit flirtations with the genre. It is in these moments that Jenkin’s film is at its weakest. For a work with such a rare, near-mesmeric slowness, these particular sequences (no spoilers) quickly rupture the viewer’s vicarious immersion in the Volunteer’s dream-nightmare. It is for this reason that the catch-all ‘folk horror’ label seems so misjudged here; the shocks and scares are somewhat secondary distractions.
Yet, as the Cinematic DNA of Enys Men programme reveals, folk-horror—particularly British, 1970s televisual folk horror—played a central role in the genesis of the project. Alan Clarke’s mystifying Penda’s Fen (1974) provided a key ‘touchstone’ for example, whilst multiple episodes of Lawrence Gordon Clark’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series also appear to have had a direct thematic and visual influence. Perhaps the most fascinating inclusion however is Margaret Tait’s A Portrait of Ga (1952), a beautiful Orcadian short film also shot on a 16mm Bolex. Like Tait, Jenkin displays a unique ability to intertwine past, present, place and protagonist, leaving us to question whether they were ever really separate entities to begin with.
The answer, of course, never comes. Enys Men’s final moments throw any potentially concrete assertions concerning the previous ninety minutes into even further doubt. Jenkin’s outright refusal to accommodate the audience with easy, definitive answers is at the crux of what makes Enys Men such a truly refreshing experience. Having sold out art-house venues from Cornwall to Edinburgh with his Q&A tour, it is clear the public is on board with such bold non-linear filmmaking; I suspect there will now be more anticipation than ever as to where Jenkin sets sail next.
The Verdict
A ‘Mark Jenkin’ film. Deserving of two, three, four viewings on the big screen. If Bait hadn’t already, Enys Men undoubtedly cements Jenkin as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary British film.
Words by Will Jones
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