22.5.23
As an experimental piece with no straightforward narrative, there’s a lot that can be extrapolated from Enys Men (Cornish for ‘Stony Island’). The overall message I took from it however is a opportune and important one, especially as it was made with a skeleton crew during lockdown. That message is, “Isolation can be both a joyful and maddening experience”.
Although it failed to unnerve me or get under my skin like I would have wanted it to, I really enjoyed watching it for its mysterious mood, unique filming techniques and reverence for The UK’s West Country that I am so familiar with.
Mark Jenkin is a director who clearly wants nothing to do with digital film and prefers the grain and character of the analogue form. I’m no expert in this field but you can tell he uses obsolete methods to film his subjects, and that most of the painstaking work goes into the editing, sound and colour design in post-production, in the absence of a heavy dialogued script or set pieces. The film’s primary colours are rich and textured, with obvious symbolism and callbacks to seminal horror films, such as Don’t Look Now and The Wicker Man.
In my perception of events, many concepts raised in the film seem like red herrings that intentionally try to misdirect the audience. Survival, mental anguish and trauma at first seem to be the main elements of the film’s thin story, but I feel like these get stripped away and what we are left to consider, or really just experience is the film’s totally unique atmosphere. This evokes some of my favourite ‘alternative horror’ films of recent years such as The Lighthouse and Under the Skin. But Enys Men is its own distinctive tale and it would be wrong to say I was thinking elsewhere during my watch: I was utterly engrossed in the protagonist’s journey, even though I couldn’t be sure what was real and what was just her experience.
It will frustrate many, but I found Enys Men to be a beguiling and haunting film that offers a poignant commentary on the post-COVID human experience as well as the universal theme of loneliness. Even to us British folk, Cornwall can seem like a remote, odd and disconnected part of the country, and Mark Jenkin and his team have accomplished that perspective with great execution.