‘Enys Men’ Is A Folk Horror Triumph [LFF ’22 Review]
When Cornwall became the last English county to be connected to the country’s national rail network in 1859, travelers arrived in droves looking to ogle its ghosts. Warrior kings, slavering beasts, giants, and giant-slayers, its list of legends runs as deep as its mines, once the most productive in the world but now long since closed.
Concerns about the county’s customs, language, and folklore being eroded by footfall are at least as old as the railway. In Enys Men, old Cornwall is already dead – and yet very much alive, its soil enriched by the deaths of industries and peoples past, whose spirits still linger.
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Directed by local bard Mark Jenkin, Enys Men is a response to his 2019 feature debut. A story of encroaching riches corroding Cornish culture, Bait was underscored by such dread that it had some viewers expecting more material frights than the existential horror that is gentrification. Here, the director provides them. Kind of. This is clearly folk horror – a troubling tale of things buried in the earth, in the past and in the mind – but that doesn’t make it clear-cut.
The film is set on Enys Men (‘stone island’ in Cornish). It’s a fictional islet home to little but birds, bees and the ancient stone that spears its heath. There’s also the curious coastal flower and the nameless wildlife volunteer (Mary Woodvine) there to study it. But, her reality is rocked when the flower seems to show an interest in her, too.
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Once again working in gorgeous, grainy 16mm, here Jenkin ditches the austere black-and-white of Bait and renders the earthy palette of West Penwith—the western tip of Cornwall, where the film was shot—in vivid color and velvet textures. The uncanny landscape provides ample opportunity for Jenkin to mess with temporality. A chimney stack still smoking years after its mine’s closure. The cottage at once dilapidated and restored. The standing stone there one minute and gone the next. In Cornwall, the past is also present.
With such little dialogue, Mary Woodvine, who returns from Bait, has to exercise restraint throughout. Whenever the camera isn’t resting on her face in close-up, it settles on minutiae. A radio grille, a rusting funnel, blood on porcelain—the mundane grounding the more unearthly goings-on.
Jenkin wields the visual grammar of folk horror and 1970s cinema like a flick knife, making small cuts that leave you open to the film’s chills. Presented via elliptical editing, the images most clearly anchored to the genre are also distinctly Cornish.
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Everything hints towards some disastrous event from the distant past or near future. People exist on multiple planes, fading in and out like spectres. The film unfolds in 1973, the year that Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now premiered with The Wicker Man as its B-picture. Both haunt Enys Men.
But there’s a faint vein of humor here, too. Bone-dry Britishisms sprout from the film’s folk horrors like lichens from a flower. A portentous moment occurs early on when the volunteer reports that she’s running low on tea. Cue a foreboding drone. What could be more frightening than this?
Jenkin frequently dials in drones to underscore such uneasy moments, while also weaponizing domestic sounds such as the hiss of a radio and the chug of a generator. Everything, dialogue included, bleeds between scenes, rendered dreamlike by Jenkin’s signature post-synced sound.
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What’s real and what’s imagined is never made clear. The dead are everywhere on Enys Men but the landscape thrums with life: birds in the sky, insects on plants. They’re all part of the circle of life and death that seems core to the island.
This is, perhaps, a story of grief and how it can root us to the scene of disaster. It’s about how the mind’s eye can’t help but stare into the source of pain, and about trying to keep your head when tragedy – and the monuments we erect to it – come pounding at your door. But the director offers no answers, instead inviting the viewer to decode the film’s mysteries just as visitors have been doing with Cornish stories for hundreds of years.
A weird ode to Wyrd Cornwall, this is a film as rugged, uncompromising, and unknowable as its setting. A decade into a folk horror revival that shows no sign of abating, Enys Men may be the new yardstick by which we measure the genre.
Summary
A weird ode to Wyrd Cornwall, this is a film as rugged, uncompromising, and unknowable as its setting. A decade into a folk horror revival that shows no sign of abating, Enys Men may be the new yardstick by which we measure the genre.
