Enys Men review – Mark Jenkin’s Cornish psychodrama will sweep you away

A lone wildlife volunteer on an island off the coast of Cornwall is haunted by the past and the landscape in the writer-director’s spellbinding follow-up to Bait

Film-maker Mark Jenkin originally intended to brand his superbly haunting follow-up to Bait (2019) as “a lost Cornish folk horror” film. He was persuaded to drop most of those descriptions: Enys Men isn’t lost (although it does feel like a recently unearthed magical relic from another era); it isn’t really horror (despite that ultra-creepy trailer); and the word “folk” is oddly misleading. That left “a Cornish film” – a simple phrase that perfectly encapsulates the myriad mysteries soaked into the dreamy, tactile landscape of this handmade gem. I could tell you that Enys Men (which means Stone Island) is Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House as reimagined by the ghost of Nic Roeg; that it’s the cult 70s TV frightener The Stone Tape reconfigured through the inspirational prism of playwright and environmental activist Nick Darke; or that it owes more to the Japanese chiller Onibaba than to the “unholy trinity” of British folk-horror (Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw and The Wicker Man). But the more I think about it, the more “a Cornish film” says it all.

It’s easier to describe Enys Men in terms of colour (red and yellow are primal elements) than plot, since its distinct brand of clockwork-cranked, luxuriously saturated cinematic poetry is supremely resistant to precis. Suffice to say that it plays out on an island off the Cornish coast in the days before May Day, 1973. Mary Woodvine is quietly mesmerising as the unnamed volunteer stationed alone on the island, although as she says: “I’m not on my own.” Her life is ritual: walking the rugged cliffs, taking temperature readings around an outcrop of rare flowers; listening to a stone drop down a mineshaft; writing the day’s findings (“no change”) in her botanical diary. Back at the cottage, she fires up the growling generator (fuel supplies are low), makes the tea (also running out), and takes to bed with a copy of A Blueprint for Survival, an environmentalist text whose cover is emblazoned with the promise that after reading it “nothing quite seems the same any more”. The same could be said of this film.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/0UrzoCs