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Following his BAFTA-winning Bait (MIFF 2019), Mark Jenkin returns with a distinct and unsettling folk-horror that blurs the line between nature documentary and haunting, half-remembered nightmare.
It’s April 1973, and every day a woman heads out to a cliff on the island upon which, aside from a large pagan standing stone, she is the sole inhabitant. She checks on the progress of a rare flower then heads back to her cottage to record her observations. No change, she notes. Her routine is ritualistic, but something is not quite right. Is she actually alone, and is time working in the usual way?
As he did with Bait, Jenkin shot Enys Men himself, in silence, with a hand-cranked camera and 16mm stock that he then hand-processed, over-dubbing the audio in post. But this time he filmed in colour. The result is gloriously rich and warm, with a grainy, period-authentic look as if the film were unearthed after decades from some hole in the ground. Inspired by Cornish folk tales (the phrase enys men is Cornish for ‘stone island’), Jenkin has foregrounded the impact of mood: here, uncertainty and mystery abound. Is it a horror, or is it something far stranger, more primal? Whatever it is, Enys Men is stunningly poetic, disorienting and evocative.
“An eerie prose-poem of a movie about loneliness … Jenkin’s style is so unusual, so unadorned, it feels almost like a manuscript culture of cinema. There is real artistry in it.” – The Guardian