Film Review: Enys Men

Director: Mark Jenkin
Starring: Mary Woodvine, John Woodvine, Edward Rowe
Running time: 96 minutes

Four years after the release of the fantastic Bait, a dreamlike tale about the working class in an increasingly gentrified and hostile Cornwall, comes Mark Jenkin’s next full length feature film Enys Men. Despite being conceptually and narratively almost indistinguishable from his previous work, it contains all the visual trademarks and idiosyncrasies that made Bait such an incredibly unique film. It features Mary Woodvine playing a wildlife volunteer currently based on the desolate island Enys Men (Cornish for “stone island”). Aside from infrequent contact with a man who routinely brings supplies she is completely isolated. Her routine consists of monitoring a set of flowers growing on the island; however, slowly as the days march on her sanity slowly starts to slip and she wonders if she is truly alone.

One thing most obvious when watching the film is that it is drastically more experimental and inaccessible than Bait, which even then wasn’t exactly a typical British social drama. Jenkin’s refusal to conform to any standard narrative structure or maintain any grounded sense of continuity makes attempting to follow a coherent story an almost impossible task. With an elliptical editing style that uses jump cuts to alter the films temporality, it makes the whole experience feel like a fever dream, or more specifically — a nightmare. Luckily the film is beautifully crafted and able to conjure a haunting and mysterious atmosphere, which leads it to successfully breaking away from the shackles of typical, contemporary filmmaking.

Many modern horror films are easily viewed as a pastiche to the late 20th century: from the overbearing neon lights, Carpenter esque synth scores and dreamlike visuals. Whilst it is easy to view Enys Men as a replication of an old school horror film, it is shot on 16mm and looks like a relic from the 1970s, there is a range of different techniques used to make it feel genuinely fresh. Mostly is the use of montage and camera angles. Jenkin’s pays very specific detail to capturing close ups of a variety of objects and human gestures — the pouring of tea to the mysterious rock formation present on the island — which make the film feel wholly distinct. These close ups are often used in repetition throughout the film. Woodvine’s character continually goes to investigate the growing flowers and every time she drops a rock down a long mining shaft. This repetition feels reminiscent of someone like Robert Bresson, with the mundanity and isolation of these acts aiding to slowly crumble the character’s sanity.

Alongside the gorgeous, yet mysterious images of the island — which absolutely revel in how kodak film captures the deep blues and greens of the scenery ­— the film’s soundscape helps construct a feeling of deep unease. Just like in Bait the film makes use of post-synch sound, a process in which all of the sound is recorded after the images and then added to the film in post-production. The film’s dialogue is incredibly sparse, probably filling just two pages of a script, but what fills in the gaps is a brilliant score; made by Jenkin himself, it consists of atmospheric and expressive ambient pieces that integrate elements of field recordings and sounds of nature. The immaculately framed compositions and the brilliant score come together to weave an almost ethereal kaleidoscope of images, which despite being purposefully disjointed, come together to illicit a genuine emotional response.

To say that Jenkin’s boils Enys Men down to pure aesthetics, an incredibly lame criticism to throw against an artistic medium almost entirely based on visual imagery, is a dismissive way of perceiving the film. Whilst it does not present any straightforward story there is an undeniably palpable sense of melancholy to the film. Enys Men looks at concepts such as memories (both real and imaginary), solitude and the history of rural Britain in such a poetic way, without ever telling you directly that it is doing so. Instead the film forces the viewer to actually think about the images on screen and attempt to craft some sort of meaning out of them. Whilst the film’s esoteric nature is undoubtedly not going to work for everyone, anyone able to overcome that barrier will find a brilliant film with some of the most exciting and experimental artistic choices being made in the UK currently.

Enys Men is currently showing at Broadway Cinema