Director: Mark Jenkin
Screenplay: Mark Jenkin
Starring: Mary Woodvine, Edward Rowe, Flo Crowe, John Woodvine
Year: 2023
Duration: 91 min
Country: UK
BBFC Certification: 15
1973, on a remote Cornish island, a volunteer observes the growth of a rare flower and loses her grip on time, reality and herself.
For me, Mark Jenkin’s previous film, Bait, never quite coalesced into a sum of its parts. Hand-cranked on grainy, monochrome 16mm film with the sound post-synched, it provided a pleasingly textural place to spend time in – as a tourist if you will – but the narrative felt removed from its aesthetic. With Enys Men, Jenkin’s visuals, rhythm and aural landscape feel utterly harmonious. A crunchy, sun-roasted hymn to folk horror, the colours, the editing, the long, long stares into our lead, Mary Woodvine’s face all accrete, like lichen, to form a hypnotic and affecting whole.
This is rich ground of course, not just the ancient, rocky Cornish soil we – like Woodvine – find ourselves caught in, but the history of cinematic horror. From the searing red mac of Don’t Look Now (a subconscious touch, the central character having been dressed in yellow until Jenkin worried she cut too similar a figure to Charlotte Gainsbourg in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist) to the slippery time of John Mackenzie’s 1978 adaptation of Alan Garner’s Red Shift. We have ancient stones, trouble with lichen and ghosts of every stripe to contend with. Like so much of the very best horror, the unease, the threat is brought to life with nothing more than an edit, the rhythm, the juxtaposition, the ebb and flow of the untrustworthy sea (the film of which is frequently reversed).
The landscape is shot with the same obsessive eye as Woodvine’s face and, as earth and mind become mutally unreliable, maybe there’s no difference between the two. It’s what’s underneath that counts.
It’s a film in which very little happens and yet, deftly, the rhythm of the dream resonates and we find ourselves swept along, dreaming it too.
Hugely recommended, a clinging, beautiful, feature.
• Presented in High Definition and Standard Definition
• Audio commentary with director Mark Jenkin and film critic Mark Kermode
• Mark Jenkin’s audio diaries (2022, 90 mins): the director charts his filmmaking process
• On-stage interview with Mark Jenkin and Mary Woodvine by film critic Mark Kermode at BFI Southbank (2022, 29 mins)
• Film Sounds with Mark Jenkin and Peter Strickland (2022, 86 mins): the director of Enys Men in conversation with filmmaker Peter Strickland (Berberian Sound Studio, Flux Gourmet) as they discuss the subtleties of sound in film
• Recording the Score (2022, 6 mins): a short clip of Mark Jenkin at work
• Haunters of the Deep (1984, 61 mins): a Children’s Film Foundation adventure that shares many of the same West Cornwall locations as Enys Men, and made quite an impression on its director.
• The Duchy of Cornwall (1938, 15 mins): a rapid survey of early Cornish history looks at the county’s language, landscape and industries
• Trailer
• Image gallery
• English subtitles for the Deaf and partial hearing and audio description (feature only)
• **FIRST PRESSING ONLY** Fully illustrated booklet featuring new essays by Rob Young, Tara Judah, Jason Wood and William Fowler
Enys Men could hardly be better presented, the image and sound from Jenkin’s head to yours. The special features are generous too, what with the commentary between Jenkin and – early champion – Mark Kermode, the interview with Jenkin and Woodvine and Jenkin’s audio diaries, the making of the film is fastidiously covered. For lovers of cinema sounds that seep into the skin, the interview with Jenkin and Peter Strickland is a joy.
