Enys Men (2022)
dir. Mark Jenkin
Rated: N/A
image: ©2022 Neon
A woman crouches on a rocky cliff overlooking the sea. She is examining a handful of white flowers with long, red stamen. She sticks a steel soil thermometer into the ground next to the flowers to check the temperature. From a distance, we see her walking along the horizon; her bright red windbreaker is striking against the green and gray of her island surroundings. She carefully drops a rock into a deep well, listening for the splash as it hits the water far below. Next, we see her recording her observations in a notebook. She writes the date – it’s April of 1973 – the temperature from the soil thermometer (14.3° C, or about 57° F) and the words “no change”.
Everything else that happens in Enys Men happens around this basic routine, which we see a dozen times over the course of the picture. It’s the most mundane depiction of data collection you could imagine. In contrast to that mundanity, the woman, referred to only as “The Volunteer” in the film’s closing credits, experiences either a psychological crisis or a metaphysical terror, though the movie never definitively answers which. We experience her reality in the form of existential dread.
Enys Men – the English translation of the Cornish title is Stone Island – is a wonderfully stylish, if nearly impenetrable, example of inventive experimental micro-budget filmmaking. Written by its Cornish director, Mark Jenkin, and filmed over the course of 21 days during the COVID-19 lockdown, the movie is a moody tone poem exploring our impact on the environment as horrific nightmare. The ghosts of the past also haunt The Volunteer, as well as the movie, giddily blurring the lines between reality and hallucination.
The most striking thing about Jenkin’s film is its audacious style, especially when considering the paltry resources used to make it. In addition to the tight shooting schedule, Jenkin had to significantly pare down his crew because of the lockdown. He also made a commitment to reduce the carbon footprint of the production as much as possible, a commendable goal that dovetails with the themes of the film. The 91-minute finished product accounted for 4.55 tons of CO2 – which the production offset with carbon credits – compared to some 3000 tons for a typical movie shoot.
Jenkin uses the boxy, 1.33:1 aspect ratio in conjunction with grainy, low-fi 16mm filmstock as a way to transport us back to the movie’s early ‘70s setting. (For his 2019 effort, Bait, set in a Cornish fishing village, Jenkin also used 16mm stock, which he shot using a vintage hand-cranked camera and processed himself by hand.) The visual aesthetics, seaside setting, and psychological terror of Enys Men is evocative of Robert Eggers’s bonkers 2019 film The Lighthouse. The two would make an inspired double feature.
Enys Men also brought to mind an Oscar-nominated documentary short film, Haulout. That 2022 film follows a marine biologist as he makes observations on the number of walruses gathering in the Russian Arctic for resting and mating purposes. The film documents how man-made climate change has affected this migration pattern and endangers the walrus population. It’s similar to Enys Men in its spartan narrative style, favoring a mysterious and eerie mood and minimal dialog.
Throughout Enys Men, we see The Volunteer reading a book titled A Blueprint for Survival, a 1972 publication that sought to address humanity’s effects on environmental degradation and steps to reverse the damage. The cover – which we see at least half-a-dozen times throughout the movie – is striking in that below the title, in blaringly large font, is a quote from the Sunday Times, “NIGHTMARISHLY CONVINCING…AFTER READING IT, NOTHING SEEMS QUITE THE SAME ANY MORE”.
With an air of Hitchcockian suspense, we wait for the inevitable. Eventually, The Volunteer must write something other than “no change” as she adds to her dozens and dozens of journal entries. She notices a fruticose lichen – I have to credit the Wikipedia plot synopsis of the movie for the term; I knew it was a fungus, but beyond that, I was at a loss – on one of the flowers she’s observing. After a time, she inexplicably observes the lichen growing on her own torso.
Other oddities abound. We see an adolescent girl climb onto the roof of the small cottage where The Volunteer is stationed. At one point, she tells the girl – in a tone that hints the girl might be her daughter – that she’s tired of having to tell her not to climb up there. When a man brings fresh provisions of food and gas for her generator – her only source of power on the otherwise uninhabited island – he comments that it must be nice to have a companion. She contradicts him, telling him that she is, in fact, alone.
What’s going on here?
We notice that the resupply boat has the same name as a boat that has been memorialized, along with its crew, on a plaque commemorating its sinking in the late 1800s as the crew tried to help a ship in distress.
The Volunteer also has eerie encounters with what might be the ghosts of minors on the island. She drinks tea made by the Seven Maidens company. In a few creepy sequences, The Volunteer lies, as if dead, in front of the flowers as either ghosts or hallucinations of the seven maidens – for an American reader, think of women in dresses, aprons, and bonnets in the style of the Pilgrims – stand silently behind her, marching ominously in place.
British actor Mary Woodvine turns in a haunted performance as The Volunteer. What Woodvine is asked to do in Enys Men is no mean feat. She carries the movie on her back. Any other character we see in the movie is on screen for a fraction of the time we see Woodvine, who appears in nearly every shot. She must also convey the dread and mystery that Jenkin is after using primarily only her face. She has, at most, a few dozen lines of dialog. The rest of the performance must be translated via expressions.
At 93, John Woodvine, Mary’s father and an actor known mostly for his stage work, appears as a ghostly preacher haunting the island and The Volunteer. His most consequential scene comes near the end of the film, and it layers even more mystery into what’s happening on the island.
In the standout sequence of the film, The Volunteer awakes one night to a sound of children singing. She slowly makes her way from her bed to the front door of the cottage. When she calls out, “Who’s there?”, the singing stops and she begins to vibrate, her body lifting up off the ground. We see the same sequence repeated later, but – and again, I’ll use the watchword of Enys Men – inexplicably, this second time it takes place in broad daylight. Another version of The Volunteer is watching from a hilltop as her other self then steps out of the cottage, seemingly not able to see the children singing (because that version of the character is experiencing this chain of events at night).
I try my best to bring contemplative interpretations of what I see on screen when I craft a review. For this? I’m not the slightest bit embarrassed to say I got nothin’. And maybe that’s exactly what Mark Jenkin wanted. His film, at times, feels like a vivid fever dream, resistant to any cogent analysis. If that was his aim, he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams with this viewer. The impenetrability of the movie makes it something of a curio; it helps to let it wash over you and is something to behold as pure sensory experience. Enys Men’s opacity doesn’t detract from the overall effect. If you’re able to fall into the movie’s hypnotic rhythm, it’s a small wonder to behold.
Why it got 3.5 stars:
- I’m confident that there’s a lot going on under the surface of Enys Men, but I’m not confident that I’m smart enough to put all the pieces together. It’s one hell of a ride, though.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- I will never tire of filmmakers putting the 1970s-era style copyright with the main title at the opening of the film. I’m sure critics and cinephiles hated their inclusion when they were introduced during the New Hollywood period, but I find them charming. I know, I’m a bad anti-capitalist. I hang my head in shame.
- There are a few scenes where The Volunteer is reading by candlelight — I’ll bet you can guess what book she’s reading — and it looks as if Jenkin is using the candlelight as his sole source of illumination for the scenes, Barry Lyndon-style. It’s a bold, and, I’m sure, difficult to pull off, stylistic choice.
- There is a work of art hanging on the cottage wall that is presumably a depiction of the island. Depicted under the island is a collection of skulls, which speaks to the strange goings-on during the movie.
- I have to wonder if the television series Lost inspired Jenkin at all.
- Raise your hand if you think Mary Woodvine resembles the Redgrave sisters so much that she could be one.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I caught this at The Texas Theatre on it’s way out of town. There were a dozen or so of us in attendance, and one gentleman in the row in front of me (who looked to be a high school- or college-aged kid) definitely seemed chemically enhanced in order to maximize his enjoyment of the trippy aesthetic. Keeping one eye on his reactions throughout the movie was almost as much fun as watching what was on the screen. Enys Men is currently playing in select theaters. It is not available for streaming as of this writing, but hopefully that will change soon.