The British county of Cornwall is ripe with myth and mystery, familiar yet remote as it juts out into the Celtic Sea. Mark Jenkin, arguably its greatest living filmmaker, once again breaks out the hand-cranked Bolex camera on which he shot he last feature, Bait, for his newest brine-sprayed mystery, Enys Men.
Bait was a mannered drama whose stylization often seemed at odds with its social realist ambitions. In that tale of a Cornish fishing village facing gentrification from tourists and property investors, the filmmaker seemed to be channeling Michael Powell’s seminal 1937 experimental docudrama, The Edge of the World. Here, Jenkin embraces what for many was the golden age of British folk horror of the late Sixties and Seventies, the time of enigmatic fables like Children of the Stones and The Stone Tape, or the coastal tragedies such as Neither the Sea nor the Sand. It’s in his selection of film stock: After the brutal, grainy black-and-white of Bait, he switches here to Kodak 16mm and the vibrant yet ghostly color palette familiar to anyone who stuck Kodachrome slides in a projector. Reds are scarlet and yellows are sunlight golden, all against subtleties of sky blue, moss green, and heather violet.
This is, after all, spring of 1973, when an unnamed volunteer botanist (Mary Woodvine) spends her days wordlessly monitoring the changes – or lack thereof – in a strange white flower that grows on this remote rock off the coast of Cornwall (“enys men” being Cornish for “stone island”). Placid isolation and repetition seem to suit her as she spends her days alone in what was seemingly once a miner’s cottage. The only interruptions may be dreams, visions, or specters – lights in abandoned mine shafts, smoke from long-extinguished chimneys, and mysterious visitors, like a young woman (Crowe) and a visiting boatman (Bait star Rowe), who she sometimes acknowledges.
Jenkin’s choice of camera has repercussions for the structure of the film – or rather, deliberate choices, since he went through the same experience with Bait. The Bolex’s clockwork mechanism makes recording sound on set impossible, while its small size allows for mobility but restricts length of shot. Jenkin therefore embraces tableaux and inserts, adding meaning to the incremental changes that seem to stem from the woman’s slow mental collapse – from isolation, from old wounds, from the spirits that seem to dwell in the soil and the sea, from the standing stone she can see from the front door of her stone cottage, or maybe from the lichen that appears on both the flowers and her own flesh. Yet while Enys Men may play with the trappings and symbolism of folk horror, it’s ultimately more of an internal drama, one driven by Woodvine’s tragic and quiet embrace of the island’s bleak remoteness: a psychological character study of a person and a landscape.
This article appears in March 31 • 2023.
