Released on BFI Player earlier this month, Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men follows the daily routine of a plant researcher (Mary Woodvine) on the remote Cornish island of the same name. Each morning, she checks on a patch of flowers overlooking the sea and drops a stone down an abandoned mine shaft (Is it to reassure herself that there is a bottom? To separate herself from whatever is down there? It is one of the many questions with which the film leaves us). Finally, she jots down her observations, which day after day tell us there has been no change.
However, as the days pass by and she starts running out of petrol, the island begins to take on a life of its own. The great standing stone outside her house looms large, seeming to vibrate in tune with the choppy radio that periodically flares up in the protagonist’s house; the flowers echo the clanging that somehow can still be heard from the long-abandoned mine, which in turn echoes the tapping of the protagonist’s own feet… We get the impression that, like the lichen which slowly covers everything, including her, the island of Enys Men is connected by a vast living network of past, present, and future.
Time seems to fold into itself in Enys Men. Snippets of information about the island’s history are revealed via artefacts, plaques, and radio announcements. We learn that a century ago the supply boat Govenek wrecked and every member of the rescue mission was killed, but it is Govenek that brings the protagonist her supplies, displaying its bright sign even as that same sign hangs splintered and waterlogged above her mantlepiece. Her house is at times a decrepit ruin, at others cosy and lived-in. She sees the supply man floating dead in the water, while later he brings her supplies, and, on another occasion, she remembers having sex with him (or is she fantasising?).
The film is much like Robert Altman’s Images or Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now with its dream-like and highly symbolic quality. Indeed, much has been said of the film’s debt to 1970s folk horror, but it owes just as much to the more psychological horror of that era. Like those, the occurrences here might represent the psychology of our protagonist – her memories, her fantasies, her fears. Enys Men can be read as a visceral and unsettling exploration of the madness of isolation. Equally, it may all be real. Our protagonist might be a part of the island; she might be dead; she might not even be herself.
Enys Men is one great mystery, dredging up unsettling questions from the depths of the island and the water that surrounds it, and leaving us with no answer. I have always thought that the best horror leaves as much as possible to the imagination. I prefer horror with no backstory, no explanations, no neat tying up of loose ends. The dread comes from the questioning, and no film understands this more than Enys Men.
“West Penwith ESA” by naturalengland is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.