 |
| Director Mark Jenkin |
ENYS MEN B+ Great Britain (96 mi) 2022 d: Mark Jenkin
Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream. —Joan Didion from The Paris Review, 1978
A metaphysical horror flick with Nicolas Roeg sensibilities, including the intrusion of the natural world in Walkabout (1971) and the recurring red coat image from Don't Look Now (1973), yet also in the editing, with its free-associative cross-cutting in time and space, where the bleak remoteness recalls Michael Powell’s The Edge of the World (1937), with a minimalist yet repeating narrative that resembles the carefully choreographed, almost mathematically precise shooting scheme of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce,1080 Bruxelles (1976), yet also delves into ghostly realms. This is one of the better efforts of using the COVID lockdown as a metaphor, shot during the pandemic, where isolation is a recurrent theme as we follow an anonymous middle-aged woman known only as a wildlife volunteer (Mary Woodvine, the director’s partner), the sole resident living alone on an island off the Cornish coast, instead spending her time hiking around the island in her hiking boots, studying and collecting data on a rare flower growing on the cliffs, making scientific entries into a daily journal, where at least initially not much changes as we see her making a cup of tea while listening to the scratchy sounds of a shortwave radio broadcast and/or a two-way radio. The grind of the routine is all that matters, with the director establishing a rhythm and unpretentious avant-garde aesthetic where not much happens, providing no clear answers by the end, with very little human interaction, as it’s all about capturing the minute details of daily living in such an isolated existence, an exploration of time, memory, nature, and grief, expressed with a sense of dread and foreboding, where it’s not really horror per se, but a cinematic aesthetic. Like the Dogma tradition, The 10 Rules of "Dogme 95", The Danish Film Movement, on Christmas Day 2012 Jenkin typed out his Silent Landscape Dancing Grain 13 film manifesto, checkthis.com/sldg13, consisting of 13 rules promoting his own film aesthetic, “to be realised with a minimum of fuss.” Rules, of course, that are later meant to be broken! In something of a one-man project, the film is written, directed, shot, and edited, with a post synchronized sound design and ambient musical score written by Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin, shot on 16mm using highly saturated color on aged film stock, using an outdated, wind-up Bolex camera that allows only 27 seconds per shot, where the authentic look of the film includes recurring dirt scratches and light flare-ups around the grainy edges of the frame, yet there’s an intoxicating style to the repetitious visual design of the film that is not like anything you typically see, featuring a prominent and almost playful use of a zoom lens, feeling more like an immersive viewer experience. Jenkin’s earlier film BAIT (2019), winner of the Outstanding Debut while nominated for Outstanding British Film of the Year at the British Bafta Film Awards in 2020 that ultimately became the most successful Cornish film ever made, had a silent film era look and was also shot in a picturesque Cornish fishing village, part of England’s rugged southwestern tip where the coast is lined with towering cliffs overlooking the Celtic Sea. Though language is sparse, occasionally heard over the radio or in carefully chosen songs, the emphasis is much like Colm Bairéad’s use of Gaelic in The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin) (2022), as there is an intentional choice to infuse the film with a thematic song written in an unsubtitled Cornish Celtic language, where a hidden history and culture are resurrected in spirit, actually reviving a Cornwall heritage that once thrived, but has now fallen on hard times, becoming part of the heart and soul of the film.
Very much focused upon texture, where the medium of film itself becomes woven into the director’s experimental artistic aesthetic, Jenkin’s film premiered in Director’s Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022, where the title (pronounced ‘Ennis Main’) is Cornish for “Stone Island,” taking place on a rocky, wind-swept island, all rocks and moss and crumbling stone ruins, where her overgrown stone home appears to be the only surviving structure. Her sense of isolation is magnified immensely by the surrounding quiet, providing a sense of timelessness, where the first spoken word comes about fifteen minutes into a film that features only a dozen or so lines of dialogue spoken throughout the whole experience. From the journal entries we can tell this is set in 1973, where the film is built around the woman’s same schedule as she gets up in the morning, hikes around the island, looks at the flowers, takes the soil temperature, sees birds flying out over the open sea, drops a rock down an old mining shaft listening for the sound, and observes any changes of note before cranking up the generator to provide electricity in the old cottage where she is living, typically writing “no changes” in her journal, where the endless repetitive cycle resembles the onset of cabin fever in Kubrick’s THE SHINING (1980), as once things start to change, her mental outlook slowly deteriorates, with the director developing a strange fascination for filming backwards. A younger girl (Flo Crowe) begins to appear in the house with her, a ghostly presence that also appears standing on the roof, but she also speaks to her in a motherly manner, though she may be a younger version of herself that simply appears to her, as if she’s seeing things in her imagination that spring from her own personal memories. Viewers don’t know how long she’s been alone on this island, or how long she’s staying, as she’s running out of supplies, but apparently is expecting to be replenished by a supply boat, as she’s connected to the outside world by a CB radio, often ignoring the voices heard. Ambiguous to the core, not really part of any pre-existing genre (though the director drew heavily from British horror films of the 70’s, occasionally resorting to schlock horror techniques), one of the first signs that her world is falling apart is an image of the boatman (Edward Rowe), who suddenly appears on this island, and may be her husband, but disappears just as quickly, like a repressed memory, seeing just a brief flash of the man’s face. Equally stunning is the appearance of local schoolchildren dancing and singing folk songs outside her cottage, resembling a May Day ceremony, remnants of a vanished community, singing a specially commissioned Kernewek Kemmyn song Kan Me - YouTube (4:09) written and performed again over the end credits by Gwenno, a Welsh singer raised by a Welsh activist mother and a Cornish poet father, who has become something of a one-woman Celtic revival. This song recurs several times throughout the film, providing an atmospheric refrain, where the haunting nature echoes a theme of internal pain and loss, adding yet another layer of texture, as the line between what’s real and what’s imagined becomes more blurred, taking a dark turn into the strange and metaphysical, forcing her, along with viewers, to question the nature of what is real and what is a developing nightmare.
The cawing sounds of seagulls and gannets comprise much of the film’s sound design and visual palette, as these birds were here long before the presence of humans, living in complete harmony with nature, seen dive bombing into the sea for fish, developing a miraculous instinct for survival even in the most remote places. The camera seems as much interested in the island itself as the woman, perhaps merging into a single consciousness, continually alternating between long takes and sudden cuts that keep viewers off balance. In an ironic twist, the woman can be seen reading Robert Allen and Edward Goldsmith’s A Blueprint for Survival each night before bed, one of the earliest warnings of climate change in 1972, a telling sign of her own fragile state of mind, offering precious insight into the tenuous state of her well-being and shifting equilibrium, as if her own survival is at stake. There is a nautical theme of shipwrecks, with a memorial plaque on the island for seafarers lost at sea attempting to save a supply boat in 1897, as emergency warning sounds can be heard over the radio as if it was happening in the present, where she appears to get lost in a time warp, Enys Men | Exclusive Clip | Opens Friday - YouTube (1:15), diving ever deeper into the darkest corners of the unknown, Clip: Enys Men (NEON) - YouTube (1:18). She also hears inexplicable sounds in the middle of the night, like water dripping, or pounding sounds underneath the earth, where she moves to explore the origin only to discover the dirty faces of tin miners illuminated by candlelight in a dripping-wet cave, men who may have lost their lives there many years ago, while an elderly preacher (John Woodvine, Mary’s father, ninety-one years old at the time) delivers apocalyptic warnings of lost faith, heard singing a healing hymn, Let the Lower Lights Be Burning - YouTube (2:46), all adding to the spectral figures connected to the island’s history who make themselves known, remnants of a time long passed, mysteriously merging together the past, present, and future. An ancient stone monolith that has been there all along (the Boswens Menhir, standing more than eight feet tall, Boswens Menhir – ancient history, mystery and modern ...), a memorial to those lost but not forgotten, suddenly changes positions on the familiar landscape, moving closer to the home, while the flowers have also disappeared, alerting viewers that something drastic is happening, perhaps losing all sense of self, 'Enys Men' Clip - Haunting Artifact a Catalyst to ... - YouTube (1:34). Mysterious sounds are the connecting tissue of this unsettling film, taking us into unexplored realms, like the eerie electronic musical score, the rustling wind, or the waves ceaselessly pounding the craggy rocks along the shoreline, creating a symphony of sounds that mirror her alarming deterioration, where her journal entries warn us of significant changes, as reality starts to break down, suddenly contaminated by the surrounding world, where each passing day sends her deeper into her own darkness, plunging us into the world of Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen) (1968). Jenkin grew up near the Merry Maidens Stone Circle, a collection of standing stones that have remained in a jagged circle since the Bronze Age, so his personalized familiarity with the history and cultural memory of the region has led to a twisted and discomforting portrait of human isolation, exaggerating the fear and paranoia associated with loneliness, creating an ominous reminder of how easily things are forgotten, where something truly terrifying can end up taking the place of everything we thought was familiar.
Understanding Mark Jenkin's Cornish Folk Horror YouTube (17:12)
