Bit of a head-scratcher this one? Film maker Mark Jenkin deepens his unusual cinematic technique with budget experimental horror 'Enys Men'. His follow-up to 2019's breakout success 'Bait' also builds its abstract narrative with pictures rather than dialogue. Images are paraded as a series of 'semi-stills': a worried facial expression, a boiling kettle, a violent sea wave, the hostility of the elements, a distorted radio sound ... the Cornish writer/director's latest hints at action without apparently providing any!?
And that's the trick of it. 'Enys Men' works on a simple narrative device. The researcher played by Mary Woodvine in the story treads a familiar path each day wandering around this small uninhabited island ('Enys Men' is Cornish for 'Stone Island') she has made her home for the period as she studies a rare flower. We get to see the same pictures over and over, but things appear to alter as she loses her grip on reality ... or does she? Mishaps occur, people appear and disappear around her, but it's hard to tell if this is really happening?
So, the narrative in 'Enys Men' doesn't so much come together as fall off the wall like flakes of plaster ... miners stare up out of a mine shaft, the battered old sign marking a shipwreck down at the island's jetty hints at a tragedy years before, the strange 'appearances' of people to the researcher's vision, a priest, a young girl, a lover, the anxious voices on her radio trying to make contact ... hard to untangle all the 'threads' and decide what's real and what's imagined? Jenkin's earlier film 'Bait' had more conventional storylines, this one leaves us in mystery mode and with the feeling of impending doom. In other words, the film menaces and 'threatens' drama but opts to not to provide any?
The film ends as quietly and uneventfully as it begins. Folk horror works by entering our psyche, playing on our worst fears, frightening us. Jenkin uses 16mm film like in 'Bait' but without the 'box' screen. The film was made during Covid-19 lockdown under filming restrictions and the crew took it upon themselves to make a low-Carbon film. I scratch my head about it all, but feel shaken up by the end, so I think the film did its job. Jenkins will no doubt turn his lens on similar objects in the future, and apply the same techniques that mark him out as such an original film maker.