‘Enys Men’ Director Mark Jenkin On His New Lo-Fi Folk Horror
Mary Beth McAndrews
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Mark Jenkin’s new film Enys Men is a dizzying and hypnotic take on the folk horror subgenre. Almost completely without dialogue, Mary Woodvine and her bright red raincoat dominate the mossy green and stormy gray frame, a beacon of humanity on an uninhabited island. Jenkin’s film is like The Lighthouse but with way less dialogue and way less discussion of farts. It’s enchanting and strange, disorienting yet beautiful.
Dread Central spoke with Jenkin about playing with time, the influences of Nicholas Roeg on Enys Men, and more.
Dread Central: From the get-go, did you know you wanted to approach Enys Men in this nightmare logic type of way?
Mark Jenkin: When it comes to genre and horror, the thing that scares me most is time not making sense. And as a medium, I think film does that better than anything else. You know, kind of skewing the idea of linear time and really keying into the way that our consciousness or subconscious or unconscious works the way we can jump around in time and space. I’ve done that with most of the films that I’ve made in my career. This is the first feature-length film that I’ve made, which is working within horror but could be argued that it’s not a straight horror film. So I wanted to push that even further and to make that feeling of the uncanny and the unsettling, when time stops making sense and you’re not quite sure where you are.
I wrote Enys Men before the whole COVID pandemic. But, I rewrote the script after the pandemic because we had to rewrite it to get the film made under the technical constraints that we had. So the film had a couple of quite big crowd scenes in it originally, and I had to go back through the script and remove those scenes because we couldn’t shoot those under the COVID restrictions. So I ended up doing more of a rewrite that I didn’t really notice I’d done until Enys Men was finished. I wanted to really emphasize this idea of how unnerving and terrifying non-linear time is. I think that comes from being in lockdown. In the UK we were shut in our houses for a long time and routine became very important.
Every night, you’d go to bed thinking, “Well this is bad.” What’s going on is bad, it’s horrible. But it’s gonna get better. It might get worse before it gets better. We’d say to my stepson, “Tomorrow’s another day and things will get better.” Then I start to think what really haunted me was the idea what if tomorrow isn’t another day? What is tomorrow? You know, what if the sun doesn’t come up tomorrow? What if time stops making sense? And I think that really influenced me when I was rewriting the script.
DC: Something I love about Enys Men is how intimate it is and how focused we are on Mary Woodvine’s character. You really get to know her and her brain in a really interesting way. What was that like working with her?
MJ: Well, Mary’s my partner, as well. So we know each other very well. And I wrote Enys Men for her and then didn’t cast her in it originally because I worried that people would think I was being nepotistic just writing a film for my partner. But she’d been so brilliant in the previous film that I’d made, Bait, as a secondary character. And I thought, I’m gonna write this film, it’s about a female protagonist, so it’s obviously gonna be written for Mary. But then I worried that people would think it was nepotistic.
So for a long time, I didn’t cast her in the film. We had a really bizarre situation where [Mary] was really almost like the casting director for me, suggesting her peers who might be ideal for the film. And in the end, I just thought, I’ve written this film for Mary every time I think about it, all I can imagine is Mary in that role.
So then I said to Denzel, the producer, and Matthew, my agent, “I think I’m gonna cast Mary in it.” And they were both like, “Oh, thank God, at last, you’ve come to the obvious conclusion.” Mary’s a theater actor. She trained as a theater actor and grew up in a theater family. She’s just up the road now rehearsing a one-woman theater show that opens next week. She relies on text and physicality as a theater actor. And as you’ve seen from my film, there’s not much text and there’s not much room for gesture. It’s about putting a constraint on what she would ordinarily do. That interior character that she’s developed and has worked on through her craft can’t express through words or through gesture.
So it tends to come out through the eyes. And I think that’s where the sort of complexity of the performance comes from. I think it’s an amazing performance. I think she felt a huge amount of pressure. I’m kind of speaking for her now, but I think she felt pressure because obviously, she’s carrying the whole film. But what I always tried to say was that if the film works, it’ll be because of her and if the film doesn’t work, that will be my responsibility. So I tried to take the pressure off her in that way.
Ultimately film isn’t necessarily an actor’s medium because I get to have the final say in the edit. So I always said to her, “If this doesn’t work, if we’ve gone too far with this, this is my fault. It’s not gonna be your responsibility, but if it’s a success then people are gonna be talking about you because you are the focus of this film.”
DC: That’s amazing. She is incredible. I love the way that you focus on her eyes, but also her feet and the sound design around her walking and the tactility of her shoes crunching on the ground. And I wanted to hear more about those choices, especially with focusing on her boots.
MJ: The thing is with feet, I mean, somebody said to me the other day in a Q&A, I think it might have been in Sweden, that I obviously had a foot fetish, which <laugh> I don’t think I have. It’s not something I’ve ever thought about before. To be totally honest with you, I film feet all the time in all of my films because of the way I shoot.
Since I shoot on 16-millimeter film, we don’t shoot a lot of footage, ironically. I don’t shoot endless takes, so I normally shoot one take of everything. I don’t shoot coverage, I don’t shoot big masters and then cut in and then punch in for closeups or anything like that. So I just shoot what I think I’m gonna need. And as a sort of thing to cover myself, and I think somebody told me this at film school, like 25 years ago or whatever, to shoot feet because they’ll always get you out of problems in the edit.
If you’ve got a continuity issue with suddenly somebody in a scene in the wrong position, you can solve that in the edit if you have a shot of their feet because you can get them to walk somewhere else within the scene. So I think that was always in my head. So when I was shooting no coverage and not many takes, I think I was thinking, “Right, I’ll just get some shots of feet here.” This was many moons ago and it’s gone from being a practical consideration to now being something that people comment on in terms of the style of how I’m shooting. But you know, I love it. I love hands and I love feet because I think it allows the audience in, and gives the audience a lot of room to interpret it.
If you see an action that doesn’t include the face, then it’s quite interesting for an audience, I think it’s like showing the back of somebody’s head in a dialogue scene. You start thinking, “Well what’s their face doing?” So when you see somebody walking, you immediately begin thinking about the rest of the body. What aren’t I seeing? Or why are we not seeing a face at this point? And then the flip side of that is, I love to see the human face on screen. If you wanna show what somebody’s thinking, you can cut out all the dialogue, all of the action and just show their eyes and it’ll give you infinite capacity to communicate with the audience.
DC: That’s amazing. And then I also wanted to hear about the color palette and how you shaped the color palette. The signature red raincoat she’s wearing just reminded me of Don’t Look Now, which I’m sure you’ve heard before. So I wanted to hear how you kind of philosophy, if you will, behind the color.
MJ: There’s no sort of color theory or anything like that behind it. My starting point is always black and white. I take a lot of black and white photographs. I shoot a lot of black and white films. So for me, I think if I’m gonna shoot color, there’s gotta be a reason for color. And there really was a reason for Enys Men. It’s not like the color has meaning, but the color is important in terms of some of the production design and props. The mantra was always, if we’re gonna do color, we’re gonna do loads of fucking color. I didn’t once consider a bleach bypass process or having it washed out or anything like that.
This was gonna be 1970s pretty cheap film stock, but where you get a celluloid red. I’m not anti-digital or anything, but I never see that beautiful red done digitally. Ours isn’t necessarily consistent all the way through. I think you could take frames from the film and put the red jacket up and it probably changes color all the way through the film. But as long as it is popping and jumping and was flagging sort of danger, that was the slight code in there. The Don’t Look Now thing was actually an accident up until the last minute.
Mary’s character was gonna have the yellow coat and the boatman whose boat she found was gonna be red. At first, she was gonna think it was a pool of blood when she saw it from a distance. But at the last minute, I suddenly thought, “She has a yellow jacket on and with brown hair and blue jeans, people are gonna think that I’ve ripped off the costume from Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist.” So at the last minute, we swapped the red and the yellow. Then on the first day of the shoot, I heard somebody in the art department say to one of the trainees, “Oh yeah, the red coat is a nod to Don’t Look Now.
And I was like, “Oh yeah, I’ve avoided a reference that nobody would’ve ever commented on and walked into a really obvious one.” I’m influenced hugely by Nicholas Roeg, his approach to editing, his approach to cinematography, using a Zoom lens and incomplete zooms, and sound and image dislocation. I’d never deny that Roeg is kind of a massive influence, but not with the Red Coat. That was a, I was gonna say a stupid decision. It wasn’t a stupid decision. Because I think it’s much better that she’s got a red coat. But it wasn’t deliberate.
Enys Men is now playing in theaters.
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